Hoebel

E. Adamson Hoebel (1906–1993) was Regents Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Having studied under Franz Boas, he held a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. There he also attended the seminars of Karl N. Llewellyn, who taught at the Columbia Law School from 1925-1951. Llewellyn (1893–1962) was the most important figure associated with the American Legal Realism of the 1920s and 1930s, which held that the law was indeterminate on the basis of statutes and precedents alone and required study of the how disputes are resolved in practice. The "sociological" wing of legal realism championed by Llewellyn held that in American law dispute resolution was strongly influenced by norms such as those in mercantile practice. Llewellyn and Hoebel (1941) went to on to develop a means of determining legal practice from ethnographic description of trouble cases, including mediation and negotiation as well as adjudication. Their "case study method" applied both to social systems with and without formal courts.

Hoebel taught anthropology at New York University from 1929 to 1948, and subsequently at the University of Utah, 1948 to 1954, where he was also dean of the University College (Arts and Sciences). He served as a Fulbright professor in anthropology at Oxford and law at Catholic University of Leuven. He retired in 1972 as Regents' Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota after teaching there for 18 years, 15 of them as head of the department. He served as president of the American Ethnological Society and the American Anthropological Association.

Between 1933 and 1949, Hoebel studied the legal systems of the Northern Cheyenne, Northern Shoshone, Comanche, and Pueblo people, and the legal system of Pakistan in 1961. He was a close friend and colleague of Max Gluckman, founder of the Manchester School of British Social Anthropology. Gluckman, also given to a realist orientation to the study of law, used and further developed Llewellyn that Hoebel's "case study method" of analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and assumptions used in trouble cases, and the influence of social norms and conflicts outside the law. The behavioral "case study" approach has continued and expanded in later anthropological works such as Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems (2005).

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