A classic resource in the modern study of the anthropology of law, this acclaimed book is now widely available again in an updated and expanded Second Edition.

There are many societies that survive in a remarkably orderly fashion without the help of judges, law courts and policemen. They are small in scale and have relatively simple technologies, lacking those centralized agencies which we associate with legal systems; yet early anthropologists did not hesitate to name "law," along with kinship, politics and religion, as one of the facets of their subject.

Simon Roberts contends,...