Reference no: EM133176878

In Rules versus Relationships, John M. Conley and William M. O'Barr examine the experiences of litigants seeking redress of everyday difficulties through the small claims courts of the American legal system. The authors find two major and contrasting ways in which litigants formulate and express their problems in terms of specific rule violations and seek concrete legal remedies that would mend soured relationships and respond to their personal and social needs. Basically it is an ethnography, that it, the author do apply the same anthropological methods used to study faraway tribes to a very different context, that is, small claims courts in the US. It is a study analyzing the ways in which regular American people relates to their legal system, their assumptions about the law and the actual facts. The texts contain basically a model about the ways in which people interact with the law.

Basically there is a psychological/anthropological continuum that goes from rules to relationships and back. What is this? To put it simply: people tend to belong to two different categories regarding their relationship to law. Either they think in terms of rules or they think in terms of relationships. Summarize.