Law, Culture, and Ritual : Disputing Systems in Cross-Cultural Context

View theTable of Contents. Read theIntroduction."Scholars will want to read this book for its contribution to comparative law, but everyone interested in American culture should read this book. Chase shows us that there is no separating law from culture: each informs and maintains the other.Law, Culture, and Ritualis a major step forward in the rapidly expanding field of the cultural study of law."-Paul Kahn, Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and Humanities, Yale Law School"Having allowed ourselves to be convinced (wrongly) that we are the most litigious people in the world, Americans have become obsessed with finding (quick) cures. Oscar Chase's book sounds a salutary warning. By presenting striking comparative examples that shatter our parochialism, he forces us to examine the cultural roots of dispute processes."-Richard Abel, Connell Professor of Law, UCLA Law SchoolLaws are products of the societies in which they operate-they originate and mutate in response to disputes that are particular to specific social, cultural, and political contexts. Disputing procedures, are therefore important mediums through which fundamental beliefs, values, and symbols of culture are communicated, preserved, and sometimes altered. InLaw, Culture, and Ritual, Oscar G. Chase uses interdisciplinary scholarship to examine the cultural contexts of legal institutions, and presents several case studies to demonstrate that the processes of resolving disputes, as much as the normative rules that are applied to them, have a cultural origin and impact.Ranging from the dispute resolution practices of the Azande, a technologically simple, small-scale African society, to the rise of discretionary authority in civil litigation in America, Chase challenges the claims of some scholars that official dispute systems are more reflective of the interests and preferences of elite professionals than of the cultures in which they are embedded.

Oscar G. Chase is Russell D. Niles Professor of Law and Coordinator of the Institute of Judicial Administration at New York University School of Law.