Limitations of the Case-Method in the Study of Tribal Law

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Abstract
E. Adamson Hoebel is justly honoured for the contribution he made to the study of tribal law by insisting on the recording and study of what he, with the late Karl N. Llewellyn, called “trouble-cases” in their innovative book, The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence (1941). The fruitfulness of this method was demonstrated also by Hoebel in another book, published at virtually the same time, on The Political Organization and Law-Ways of the Comanche Indians (1940), and argued further in his The Law of Primitive Man (1954). We may see the form of these studies as emerging partially from the method of case-law in Anglo-American jurisprudence, and here the influence of Llewellyn was probably important. But concentration on specific “cases”, “situations”, “incidents”, et alia, was also part of a general tendency in social science from the 1920's onwards: the increasing focus of analysis on untangling the structure of specific situations against the general social background was marked in political science and economics (see e.g., Devons, 1960, 1970) and sociology (see e.g., Gouldner, 1954). I have discussed the general development in social anthropology (Gluckman, 1959, 1965b, 1967).

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