Alaskan Bush Justice: Legal Centralism Confronts Social Science Research and Village Alaska [chapter]

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Author
Conn, Stephen
Keyword
Alaska Court System
Alaska history
Alaska Natives
bush justice
courts
justice research
legal pluralism
magistrates
rural justice
traditional law ways
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URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11122/9752
Other identifiers
JC 8211.03
Abstract
This paper traces the history of the bush justice system in rural Alaska, describes the relationship between traditional Alaska Native dispute resolution mechanisms and the state criminal justice system, and analyzes bush justice research between 1970 and 1981 and its effects on state agency policies and changes in the rural justice system. Innovations by researchers were well-received by villagers and field-level professionals, but not by agency policymakers. Hence, most reforms made in the 1970s had vanished by the early 1980s. The author concludes that further reforms will be ineffective unless Alaska Natives are drawn into the decisionmaking process as co-equal players negotiating on legal process from positions of power.
Description
This paper was revised and shortened for inclusion in the volume "People’s Law and State Law: The Bellagio Papers", which serves as the “proceedings” volume for the first conference of the Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences held at Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy, September 1981. The paper as originally presented in 1981 can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/11122/9750.
Table of Contents
The environment for research / What is the bush justice system in Alaska? / The early years of the relationship / The later years / Impact on council justice in the 1970s / Village efforts / Professional perspectives / Magistrates as guardians of due process / The researchers' perspective / The problem board experiment / The court experiment with problem boards / Paralegals / Projects accomplished and their bureaucratic response / The present / Notes / References / APPENDICES [ORIGINAL] / Appendix 1. Public Officials Assessments of Quality of Justice and Selected Public Services [ca. 1978] / Appendix 2. Comparison of Alaska Villages, Alaska Statewide, and United States Crime Rates [1977] / Appendix 3. Statewide Juvenile Arrest Rated per 100,000 Individuals [1978] / APPENDICES (ACCESSIBLE)
Date
1985
Publisher
Foris Publications
Type
Proceedings
Citation
Conn, Stephen. (1985). "Alaskan Bush Justice: Legal Centralism Confronts Social Science Research and Village Alaska." In Antony Allott & Gordon R. Woodman (eds.), People's Law and State Law: The Bellagio Papers, pp. 299–320. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris Publications.
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