ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have given relatively little attention to the culture of the law in Euro-American settings. I do not mean that we have neglected study of the attitudes, values, class affiliations and so forth of attorneys and jurists. Nor do I necessarily mean the legal consciousness of people and their experiences with the formal institutions of the law. These are well defined as the proper domain of social scientists (e.g. Merry 1990), as have been the legal institutions and social and cultural dimensions of law in non-Western societies (e.g. Rosen 1989). What I mean is the set of symbolic constructs that makes up a particular body of law and that is used to underpin legal practice: concepts and doctrines and how they come about and change (see Starr 1989).
