ABSTRACT
As we worked through other areas of social life in previous chapters, we came up against law at certain points: new marriage laws, new constitutions. And at many more points we encountered areas of conflict which had some relevance to the problems of establishing social order and maintaining social control. Society, as we have seen, comprises both rules and behaviour which deviates from these rules. In one sense, instead of defining ‘law’ as a set of binding rights and obligations, we might regard it as the relationship between these rules and actual behaviour, and how this relationship is managed. Here we are including within the definition of law not merely explicitly legal institutions, but also the broader field of the ‘customary’ resolution of conflict.
