Greg, in my opinion, has pointed out one of the most important problems/implications that arises if we ascribe any value to Black's model (which I think we should). I would like to share the optimism of the above quote, and to some extent, I do. However, there are substantial barriers to "turning off autopilot" as an individual, let alone convincing others to do so as well.

Black posits that even in less "developed" societies, law behaves the same in relation to the distribution of resources and to the relationships between individuals. However, I propose that, in a modern nation, the established (perhaps inevitable in human society? Black seems to suggest this...) patterns that law follows are even more difficult to challenge as an individual. The common culture, largely defined by schooling and mass-media, inherently seeks to validate and perpetuate the way that the society functions. This could be tempered, in somewhere like the United States, by the fact that there is room for dissent or, as Greg suggests, "conceptual room for convincing other people." However, when an individual is raised on the same structure-affirming information as his parents, and their parents, it should be more difficult for him to disengage with the "state of things" then it would be for someone whose reality is largely defined by their family or village.

Further, even if we can resist these impulses and reach some moment of epiphany that enables us to break from the patterns of group behavior and even react against it (I picture this as something like Edward Norton's transformation in Fight Club), it should be immensely difficult to get others to follow us down that path. Even in the rarified air of Columbia Law School, within the self-selected group of students who chose to take this class, we see significant resistance to ideas challenging certain tenets of our society-defined selves.

This is driven, in our case, by the carrots dangled in front of our faces, which will be given to us if we choose NOT to challenge the behavior of the law. It might require deep dissatisfaction in order for an individual to "turn off auto-pilot", and I question whether most students at the law school aren't actually pretty happy with the state of affairs around them. If you can benefit from the behavior of law in your society more than almost the entire rest of the population, what incentives do you have to challenge it?

Finally, I wanted to address the other Greg's point about the model's failure to explain our society's tendency to use law as a means to actually redistribute resources through the social strata, toward the bottom. While I agree that phenomena such as welfare programs or fundamental rights guarantees seem to suggest that Black's description of law's behavior is not universally applicable, I do question the claim that "people with low "rank" and high "relational distance" arguably benefit the most from governmental social control".

The use of law for "philanthropic", benevolent purposes in the examples that you cite might also be seen as a means of achieving a certain stasis, enabling higher "ranking" groups and individuals to protect their wealth from frontal attack by keeping the people with "low rank" above the level at which they are desperate enough to rebel. Granted, this is a stylized explanation of the legal developments you've mentioned, and is susceptible to criticism in and of itself. However, I think it shows that, although more complex forces strain Black's model, the implications of his section on stratification may be more relevant than we think in our egalitarian modern society.