Hoebel, E. Adamson (1906–1993)

Edward Adamson (“Ad”) Hoebel was an accomplished ethnographer of American Indians and the author of two important anthropology texts. Nevertheless, Hoebel's greatest reputation was in law. He studied anthropology at Columbia under Franz Boas (1858–1942) and Ruth Benedict (1887–1948). When they discouraged his interest in Plains Indian law, he turned to Karl Llewellyn (1893–1962), the legal realist, and produced a PhD dissertation on the politics and law of the Comanche.

The two later collaborated to produce The Cheyenne Way (1941), using the empirical case study method to establish that Cheyenne society required social control and that this social control occurred within bounded groups, was made by authorities within these groups, and had sanctions. With this work, they conclusively proved that one might find law in a technologically primitive society (TPS) with no written codes. Llewellyn and Hoebel also showed the relationships between cases and abstract legal principles in Cheyenne society in this classic work, which marks the genesis of modern legal anthropology.

In Law of Primitive Man (1954), Hoebel recognized the necessity of studying a variety of legal systems around the world in different types of societies to make valid generalizations about law. He studied some personally (such as the Shoshone, Comanche, Cheyenne, Keresan Pueblo, and Pakistani) and others through books (for example, the Trobriand, Indonesian, Kalinga, Kiowa, Ashanti, Eskimo, and Ifugao). He set out three “essential elements of law,” which identified legal phenomena worldwide. The first phenomenon was regularity; law is regularly applied in the same manner. The second was the need for official authority, a figure with “the explicit capacity to direct the behavior of others.” The final one was sanction, which forces obedience.

Hoebel's legacy results largely from his scientific examination of ideas put forth by others. He empirically demonstrated the falsity of Henry Sumner Maine's (1822–1888) speculative claims that law in TPS was unchanging, rigid, and patriarchal. Many supposed at the time that law developed from either feud or religion. Hoebel, using several examples, proved that people in TPS went to great lengths to avoid or end feuds because they so damage the group. He revealed that feud truly stood as the opposite of law. Hoebel also showed that Maine's idea that crimes originated from sins was erroneous, with evidence that the range of behaviors addressed by one differs from that of the other.

Furthermore, Hoebel disproved Bronislaw Malinowski's (1884–1942) theory of law in TPS, which stated that law consists solely of reciprocal obligations, by pointing out that one could always find people who tried to benefit by disregarding the rules of reciprocity, using theft, murder, or other behavior, and who must be, and would be, dealt with legally.

In his examination of change in legal systems, Hoebel proved that no unilinear set of stages could ever succeed as an accurate model. Finally, he established that truly anarchic societies do not exist, because groups form around exceptional individuals who then make law.