Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation, and obligation.
Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, this work makes explicit comparisons of tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science, and anthropology to offer a truly interdisciplinary, pathbreaking view. Ultimately, tort law, the authors show, nests within a larger web of relationships and shared discursive conventions that organize social life.

Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation, and obligation.
Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, this work makes explicit comparisons of tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science, and anthropology to offer a truly interdisciplinary, pathbreaking view. Ultimately, tort law, the authors show, nests within a larger web of relationships and shared discursive conventions that organize social life.

The first reader on Asian law and society scholarship, this book features reading selections from a wide range of Asian countries - East, South, Southeast and Central Asia - along with original commentaries by the three editors on the theoretical debates and research methods pertinent to the discipline. Organized by themes and topical areas, the reader enables scholars and students to break out of country-specific silos to make theoretical connections across national borders. It meets a growing demand for law and society materials in institutions and universities in Asia and around the world. It is written at a level accessible to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students as well as experienced researchers, and serves as a valuable teaching tool for courses focused on Asian law and society in law schools, area studies, history, religion, and social science fields such as sociology, anthropology, politics, government, and criminal justice.

The first reader on Asian law and society scholarship, this book features reading selections from a wide range of Asian countries - East, South, Southeast and Central Asia - along with original commentaries by the three editors on the theoretical debates and research methods pertinent to the discipline. Organized by themes and topical areas, the reader enables scholars and students to break out of country-specific silos to make theoretical connections across national borders. It meets a growing demand for law and society materials in institutions and universities in Asia and around the world. It is written at a level accessible to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students as well as experienced researchers, and serves as a valuable teaching tool for courses focused on Asian law and society in law schools, area studies, history, religion, and social science fields such as sociology, anthropology, politics, government, and criminal justice.

This book addresses some of the most difficult and important debates over injury and law now taking place in societies around the world. The essays tackle the inescapable experience of injury and its implications for social inequality in different cultural settings. Topics include the tension between physical and reputational injuries, the construction of human injuries versus injuries to non-human life, virtual injuries, the normalization and infliction of injuries on vulnerable victims, the question of reparations for slavery, and the paradoxical degradation of victims through legal actions meant to compensate them for their disabilities. Authors include social theorists, social scientists and legal scholars, and the subject matter extends to the Middle East and Asia, as well as North America.

This volume celebrates the remarkable scholarly career of medieval historian John Van Engen with eighteen exceptional essays contributed by Van Engen's colleagues and former doctoral students, a group that includes some of the best established scholars of the Middle Ages as well as leading younger ones. Together, their work reflects the wide-ranging but coherent body of John Van Engen's own scholarship.
In a section on Christianization, Ruth Mazo Karras explores medieval marriage, Lisa Wolverton offers a new model of the Christianization of Bohemia, R. I. Moore examines the historiography of the Cathars, and Christine Caldwell Ames links the inquisition with medieval and modern concepts of popular religion. Under the rubric of twelfth-century culture, Maureen C. Miller uses eleventh-century Roman frescoes to rethink reform, Jonathan R. Lyon unpacks Otto of Freising's notions of advocacy and tyranny, Rachel Koopmans traces testimonial letters associated with the cult of Thomas Becket, Dyan Elliot deliberates on the importance of what she calls counterfactual, or alternative, realities in twelfth-century thought and literature, and Giles Constable traces manifestations of the cross in monastic life.
Three essays study Jews and Christians in society. Susan Einbinder probes the connections between martyrdom, politics, and poetry in thirteenth-century Castile, William Chester Jordan traces anti-Judaism in the "Christina Psalter, "and David C. Mengel highlights the significance of urban space for Jews in fourteenth-century Prague and Nuremberg. Lastly, contributors explore topics in late medieval religious life, a special focus of Van Engen's scholarship. Walter Simons edits and analyzes a letter defending beguines in the Low Countries, William J. Courtenay traces the effects on pastoral care of papal provisions to university scholars, and James D. Mixson reinterprets the fifteenth-century treatise "Firefly." An essay by Marcela K. Perett looks at vernacular anti-Hussite treatises, Daniel Hobbins employs a fifteenth-century Italian story about Antichrist to consider hearsay, belief and doubt, and Roy Hammerling contemplates Martin Luther's understanding of himself as a beggar.
""Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen "is a thrilling collection, both wide-ranging and informative. The contributions are well-structured, well-argued, and comprehensive in bibliography and source materials--a welcome volume to celebrate the work of John Van Engen." --Anthony Lappin, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Many commentators on the contemporary United States believe that current rates of litigation are a sign of decay in the nation's social fabric. Law and Community in Three American Towns explores how ordinary people in three towns located in New England, the Midwest, and the South view the law, courts, litigants, and social order.

Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel analyze attitudes toward law and law users as a way of commentating on major American myths and ongoing changes in American society. They show that residents of "Riverside," Sander County, and Hopewell interpret litigation as a sign of social decline, but they also value law as a symbol of their local way of life. The book focuses on this ambivalence and relates it to the deeply-felt tensions express between community and rights as rival bases of society.

The authors, two anthropologists and a lawyer, each with an understanding of a particular region, were surprised to discover that such different locales produced parallel findings. They undertook a comparative project to find out why ambivalence toward the law and law use should be such a common refrain. The answer, they believe, turns out to be less a matter of local traditions than of the ways that people perceive the patterns of their lives as being vulnerable to external forces of change."

"Rights of Inclusion" provides an innovative, accessible perspective on how civil rights legislation affects the lives of ordinary Americans. Based on eye-opening and deeply moving interviews with intended beneficiaries of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), David M. Engel and Frank W. Munger argue for a radically new understanding of rights - one that focuses on their role in everyday lives rather than in formal legal claims. Although all 60 interviewees had experienced discrimination, none had filed a formal protest or lawsuit. Nevertheless, civil rights played a crucial role in their lives. Rights improved their self-image, enhanced their career aspirations and altered the perceptions and assumptions of their employees and coworkers - in effect producing more inclusive institutional arrangements. Focusing on these long-term life histories, Engel and Munger incisively show how rights and identity affect one another over time and how that interaction ultimately determines the success of laws such as the ADA. For anyone concerned with rights, disability and the law, "Rights of Inclusion" should be a landmark work.

This book addresses some of the most difficult and important debates over injury and law now taking place in societies around the world. The essays tackle the inescapable experience of injury and its implications for social inequality in different cultural settings. Topics include the tension between physical and reputational injuries, the construction of human injuries versus injuries to non-human life, virtual injuries, the normalization and infliction of injuries on vulnerable victims, the question of reparations for slavery, and the paradoxical degradation of victims through legal actions meant to compensate them for their disabilities. Authors include social theorists, social scientists and legal scholars, and the subject matter extends to the Middle East and Asia, as well as North America.