Suchergebnisse

With this article the authors attempted to make the achievements of the anthropology of law in the study of primitive society more accessible to lawyers. Currently these achievements are mainly not used by lawyers because of the difference in defining law: legal anthropologists consider it to be a broader phenomenon than it is usually considered by lawyers. As a result, lawyers quite often do not pay proper attention to the anthropologists' data concerning law in primitive society. To overcome this negative effect, the authors have revealed and characterized certain rules covered by law as it is defined by most lawyers, based on the critics of the American legal anthropologist E. A. Hoebel's definition of law. The above mentioned norms include the rules concerning stealing, adultery, incest in the societies of primitive Australians and the norms forbidding recidivist homicide, murder of one person and wounding some others, sorcery, chronic lying, refuse of rich people to share their belongings at request of others among the Eskimos. This example of legal regulation may serve to improve the modern law. The authors consider, for example, the formulation of new norms concerning stealing and homicide. They also approach the question whether it is necessary to legislate when the society has a conviction that certain human acts threat the existence of the so