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Courting Difference: Issues of Interpretation and Comparison in The Study of Legal Ideologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Carol J. Greenhouse
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Abstract

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This article explores the connections between the interpretive and comparative dimensions of ideology by analyzing ethnographic data from an American town. The town is undergoing a rapid process of urbanization, and townspeople are absorbed in the analysis of the changes around them and their town's prospects as a community. The article compares interview data and courtroom observations in which local understandings are shown to be constituted in pervasive cultural distinctions: past and future, insiders and outsiders, harmony and conflict, gender, and various forms of family life shape local views of change and conflict. The conclusion relates an analysis of the symbolic terms in which these distinctions are expressed to general issues of the nature of ideologies and their truth claims.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 22 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Law and Ideology , 1988 , pp. 687 - 707
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

In thinking about this paper, I have benefitted from a number of conversations. First, it is a pleasure to acknowledge Professors David Engel and Barbara Yngvesson, with whom I enjoyed extensive conversations comparing analytical problems and findings in our three independent ethnographic studies of court use in American towns. Their contributions are cited as Engel (1987) and Yngvesson (1986). The earliest version of this paper was the basis for my contribution to a series of presentations that we gave jointly at the Law and Society Association annual meeting, the Cornell Law School, and the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, all in 1986. A second debt is to organizers and participants in the American Bar Association's workshop on “Teaching America: Pluralism and Community in a Republic of Laws” who provided an occasion for developing some of the implications of the ethnographic material presented here. I am grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University, for the study leave during which I wrote the first draft. I am also indebted to Professor P. Steven Sangren, Professor Austin Sarat, and anonymous readers for this special issue for their comments.

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