Law, Time, and Community

Research concerning law and social change has almost always treated time as a universal constant and a baseline against which variations in behavior can be measured. Yet a significant literature exists demonstrating that researchers can also regard time as a socially constructed phenomenon requiring analytic interpretation in its own right. This article explores two aspects of the human experience of time that were especially important for the residents of a rural American community: the sense of time\u27s iterative character and its linear or irreversible quality. These two ways of experiencing and conceptualizing time played a significant part in efforts by residents of Sander County, Illinois, to define their community and interpret the social, cultural, and economic transformations it was undergoing. They were also important in the residents\u27 efforts to frame and define conflict within the community and to determine when law should or should not be invoked. The article examines some ways in which the analysis of varying conceptions of time within a community can enhance understanding of expectations, perceptions, and values concerning law in a changing society

Chairs, Stairs, and Automobiles: The Cultural Construction of Injuries and the Failed Promise of Law

Published as Chapter 5 in Injury and Injustice: The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress, Anne Bloom, David M. Engel & Michael McCann, eds.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1356/thumbnail.jp

Vertical and Horizontal Perspectives on Rights Consciousness

It has become commonplace to assert that rights consciousness is expanding globally and that individuals worldwide demonstrate an increasing awareness of and insistence upon their legal entitlements. To marshal empirical support for such claims is, however, exceedingly complex. One important line of socio-legal research on rights consciousness adopts what might be called a “vertical” perspective, tracing the flow of legal norms and practices from prestigious international organizations and world centers of cultural production to local settings, where they may be adopted, resisted, or transformed. Vertical perspectives on rights consciousness have contributed new understandings of law in contemporary societies around the world, but alone they cannot determine whether rights consciousness has expanded or contracted in relation to other systems of norm enforcement and dispute resolution. To answer this question, vertical perspectives must be combined with horizontal perspectives to ascertain what norms, practices, and beliefs prevail within various social fields where ordinary people engage in everyday interactions. A combination of vertical and horizontal perspectives is illustrated by research on rights consciousness in northern Thailand, which suggests the counterintuitive conclusion that rights consciousness may have diminished and that ordinary people rely instead on new forms of religiosity to justify inaction even in the face of serious legal harms

Origin Myths: Narratives of Authority, Resistance, Disability, and Law

Origin stories are a distinctive form of narrative. In their account of how something began to be, such stories connect past and present, clarify the meanings of important events, reaffirm core norms and values, and assert particular understandings of social order and individual identity. The parents of children with disabilities tell strikingly similar origin stories about the day their child was first diagnosed. Such stories not only explore the meanings of a transformative event but also draw implicit connections between past encounters with medical specialists and present encounters with educational specialists as mandated by an important federal statute. This article, based on an ethnographic study of parents, children, and educators, traces the implicit references in the parents\u27 origin myths to a set of key oppositions that reflect their experiences within the statutory framework of special education: cooperative versus unilateral decisionmaking, lay versus professional knowledge, and authority versus legal empowerment. The article also compares the ways in which law and myth address the conflicting perspectives of disability specialists and of the parents and children themselves

Litigation Across Space and Time: Courts, Conflict, and Social Change

One of the problems facing researchers who have studied courts across time and space has been the cultural variability of seemingly uniform analytic categories, including conceptions of time and space themselves. This article proposes that we take such variations in meaning as a starting point for comparative studies of courts and social change rather than viewing them as were noise in the system. Litigation in Chiangmai, Thailand, is presented as an example. Changing conceptions of space in Thailand from the nineteenth century to the present illustrate the transformation of legal and political authority as well as the proliferation of normative systems and dispute processing fora. By focusing analysis on variations in the meaning of a concept such as space, it is possible to discern the significance of litigation in relation to unofficial systems of normative ordering and to gain insight into changing relationships among individuals, local communities, patron-client hierarchies, and the state

David Engel and The Oven Bird\u27s Song (Edited Interview)

Published as Chapter 8 in Conducting Law and Society Research: Reflections on Methods and Practice, Simon Halliday & Patrick Schmidt, eds. Understanding litigiousness involves many perspectives on how societies generate, shape, and process disputes. Whereas some may begin the study of disputing with the law and the formal institutions charged with implementing it, or what happens “in court,” a long tradition of Law and Society scholarship has emphasized the importance of seeing how cultural practices give life and meaning to the law. Though some of this scholarship has come from anthropology, much of it has been produced by scholars from other disciplinary backgrounds who have been attracted to ethnographic methods and the promise of understanding legality through the eyes of “regular” people – not lawyers or judges but the ordinary people who experience “law.” Like other scholars in this collection, such as Carol Greenhouse (Chapter 10), Sally Engle Merry (Chapter 12), and the team of Patty Ewick and Susan Silbey (Chapter 19), David Engel sought to explore legal consciousness as it existed in the narratives and lives of such people. As he describes it, the route of this intellectual approach stems from a personal journey, one that helped open his eyes to his own country. Unlike some ethnographic studies, however, he conducted his research without full-time immersion in the community he was studying. This interview explores some of the substitutions and strategies Engel made to seek his desired depth of understanding, and some of the challenges that inhere to the approach. Both in the substance of the article and in the research process itself, we find the temporal dimension – for the latter, the time that Engel spent in the field and in mulling over the data. The product of that gestation was a memorable article with a memorable title.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1151/thumbnail.jp