Books in the Legalism series

Bringing together a multidisciplinary team to address issues of community and justice, this volume uses empirical case studies to untangle the complex relationships between law, justice, and community.

What is legalism and what counts as law? How do legal concepts work in a range of historical and ethnographic settings? The problems anthropology and history share in dealing with law are addressed here from a range of perspectives including medieval England and France, Burma, India, Saharan oases, and southern Arabia.

Drawing on a wide range of historical and ethnographic examples, this volume elucidates the relationship between legal thinking and explicit rules and categories from a rigorously cross-cultural and comparative perspective.

This volume brings together anthropologists and historians to examine how property and ownership operate and are understood across contexts ranging from Roman provinces to modern-day piracy in Somalia. Among other things it examines the way legal property regimes intertwine with economic, moral-ethical, and political prerogatives.