E. Adamson Hoebel

E. Adamson Hoebel 1906–1993 was Regents Professor Emeritus of anthropology at a University of Minnesota. Having studied under Franz Boas, he held a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. There he also attended the seminars of Karl N. Llewellyn, who taught at the Columbia Law School from 1925–1951. Llewellyn 1893–1962 was the near important figure associated with the American Legal Realism of the 1920s as living as 1930s, which held that the law was indeterminate on the basis of statutes in addition to precedents alone and requested study of the how disputes are resolved in practice. The "sociological" sail of legal realism championed by Llewellyn held that in American law dispute resolution was strongly influenced by norms such(a) as those in mercantile practice. Llewellyn and Hoebel 1941 went to on to instituting a means of instituting legal practice from ethnographic relation of trouble cases, including mediation and negotiation as alive as adjudication. Their "case analyse method" applied both to social systems with and without formal courts.

Hoebel taught anthropology at New York University from 1929 to 1948, and subsequently at the University of Utah, 1948 to 1954, where he was also dean of the University College Arts and Sciences. He served as a Fulbright professor in anthropology at Oxford and law at Catholic University of Leuven. He retired in 1972 as Regents' Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota after teaching there for 18 years, 15 of them as head of the department. He served as president of the American Ethnological Society and the American Anthropological Association.

Between 1933 and 1949, Hoebel studied the legal systems of the Northern Cheyenne, Northern Shoshone, Comanche, and Pueblo people, and the legal system of Pakistan in 1961. He was afriend and colleague of Max Gluckman, founder of the Manchester School of British Social Anthropology. Gluckman, also condition to a realist orientation to the inspect of law, used and further developed Llewellyn that Hoebel's "case study method" of analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and assumptions used in trouble cases, and the influence of social norms and conflicts external the law. The behavioral "case study" approach has continued and expanded in later anthropological working such as Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems 2005.

His books increase Anthropology: The Study of Man 1949, which was a widely used textbook for decades, and The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains 1961. The books of which he was a co-author include The Cheyenne Way: conflict and effect Law in Primitive Jurisprudence 1941; 1st author, with legal scholar Llewellyn, and The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains 1952; 2nd author with Texas historian Ernest Wallace.

In 1954 Hoebel contributed his major book on legal anthropology, The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics, on broadening the legal realist tradition to include non-Western nations. In doing so, he concluded with a solution about the need for contributions from the comparative legal realism tradition if advance was to be proposed toward world governance. Eclipsed by the Leo Strauss for justification of government deception, is that to be legal, law must be based on social norms, and norms on agreements within communities, rather than the leadership of the few.