Question

Law and Order
JAMES P. SPRADLEY AND DAVID W. McCURDY
Summary In this article, Spradley and McCurdy present law in the context of dispute resolution, using cases drawn from anthropologist Laura Nader's work in Ralu"a, a Zapotec Indian village located in southern Mexico.
The article deals with several concepts: the structure of legal culture, including substantive law and procedural law, legal levels, legal principles, and cultural values. Substantive law consists of the legal statutes that define right and wrong. This is illustrated by the flirtation of a married man with an unmarried woman, which the Zapotec treat as a crime. Similarly, the case of a son who harvested coffee from his father's land without permission is also defined as a crime to be dealt with by the community's legal system.
Legal levels refer to the ways in which disputes are settled by different kinds of authority agents. Among the Zapotec, several levels for settling disputes exist. Disputes can be settled by family elders, witches, local officials, the priest, supernatural beings, or officials in the municipio. If all else fails, the dispute can be taken to the district court in Villa Alta.
Procedural law refers to the agreed-upon ways to settle disputes, which are often unwritten, and therefore implicit in nature. In Ralu"a, for example, it is generally agreed that one should not take family disputes to court, and disputes between villagers (such as an argument over the washing stone) should be taken to court only if they cannot be settled between the disputing individuals beforehand. In this case, the dispute was settled when the presidente (village chairman who also presides over the village court) and other elected village officials formed a work force, improved the washing facilities at the well, and declared that washing stones would no longer be owned by individuals.
Legal systems reflect legal principles and cultural values. Legal principles are based on the fundamental values of a culture; a legal principle is a broad conception of some desirable state of affairs that gives rise to many substantive and procedural rules. Americans put great emphasis on establishing truth, while for the Zapotec, a major legal principle is to "make the balance." This means to encourage compromise and settlement so that disputes disappear and disputants get along with each other in the future. This in turn is based on the Zapotec cultural value of maintaining social equilibrium. A direct confrontation between individuals where one loses and another wins is unsettling to community members.
According to Spradley and McCurdy in "Law and Order," substantive law is codified in writing in literate societies. In non-literate societies, people define what a crime is by using procedural law.

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