NCJ Number
166867
Date Published
1995
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This paper examines lessons to be learned from the oral traditions of the legal institutions and officials of native peoples.
Abstract
"Law-ways" and "law-jobs" are terms that have been used primarily by legal anthropologists to define the legal institutions and officials of native peoples whose institutional framework has rested chiefly on oral traditions. "Law-ways" refers to all the processes by which disputes are resolved, and "law-jobs" to the work of people who act as intermediaries in the resolution of such disputes. This paper advises that the terms "law-ways" and "law-jobs" can provide useful tools to examine dispute resolution both inside and outside formal court records. One section of the paper discusses British colonies in Africa as useful comparative laboratories for an examination of how common law as common custom and common law as judicial precedent as well as legislative enactment work in both pre-industrial and post- industrial societies. This is followed by a review of legal- historical scholarship in Canada and the ways in which legal records have been used in such scholarship. The author advises that the future of law and society studies depends on methodologies that are not wedded to industrial societies or bureaucratic states, but are integrated with the fabric of society. It is here that legal-historical writers and archivists must consider not only the anthropological models discussed in this paper within the term "law-ways," but also the sociological, i.e., that which has been called "facilitative law." This paper concludes with a suggestion for a documentary heritage in the common law world. 78 notes