| Description |
1 online resource (x, 228 pages) |
| Contents |
Introduction: Ethnographic Issues -- pt. 1. Ethnographic Studies. Ch. 1. The Oven Bird's Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community. Ch. 2. Making Law at the Doorway: The Clerk, the Court, and the Construction of Community in a New England Town. Ch. 3. Courting Difference: Issues of Interpretation and Comparison in the Study of Legal Ideologies -- pt. 2. Law, Values, and the Discourse of Community. Ch. 4. Avoidance and Involvement. Ch. 5. Connection and Separation. Ch. 6. History and Place -- Conclusion: The Paradox of Community |
| Summary |
"Many commentators on the contemporary United States believe that current rates of litigation are a sign of decay in the nation's social fabric. Law and Community in Three American Towns explores how ordinary people in three towns--located in New England, the Midwest, and the South--view the law, courts, litigants, and social order. Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel analyze attitudes toward law and law users as a way of commentating on major American myths and ongoing changes in American society. They show that residents of "Riverside," "Sander County," and "Hopewell" interpret litigation as a sign of social decline, but they also value law as a symbol of their local way of life. The book focuses on this ambivalence and relates it to the deeply-felt tensions express between "community" and "rights" as rival bases of society. The authors, two anthropologists and a lawyer, each with an understanding of a particular region, were surprised to discover that such different locales produced parallel findings. They undertook a comparative project to find out why ambivalence toward the law and law use should be such a common refrain. The answer, they believe, turns out to be less a matter of local traditions than of the ways that people perceive the patterns of their lives as being vulnerable to external forces of change."--Amazon.com |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-218) and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Law -- Social aspects -- United States
|
|
Law and anthropology.
|
|
Sociological jurisprudence.
|
|
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural.
|
|
Law and anthropology
|
|
Law -- Social aspects
|
|
Sociological jurisprudence
|
|
Stadt
|
|
Rechtsanthropologie
|
|
Rechtsantropologie.
|
|
United States
|
|
USA
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| Author |
Yngvesson, Barbara, 1941-
|
|
Engel, David M
|
| ISBN |
9781501725012 |
|
1501725017 |
|
