NUMBER 32 / 1992

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

ANITA BOCKER (born in 1959 in Groningen, the Netherlands) studied social anthropology and sociology at the University of Groningen, graduating in 1986. She was co-author of a book on the handling of complaints about racial discrimination in the Netherlands (C. Biegel, A. Böcker and K. Tjoen-Tak-Sen, Rassendiscriminatie... tenslotte is het verboden bij de wet. Zwolle: W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, 1987). She is now doing research among Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands, on the subject of social security. She works at the Institute of Sociology of Law and the Institute of Folk Law of the University of Nijmegen.

DAVID M. ENGEL is a Professor of Law and Directory of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has written about courts, social change, conflict and culture in Thailand and the USA. He is currently working as co-author on a book about courts and community in three American towns. He is also conducting research on the families of children with disabilities.

A.B. VAN ROUVEROY VAN NIEUWAAL is a frequent contributor. He has made several documentary films about the Anufò society in northern Togo, mostly dealing with dispute settlement. His latest film, Democratic Adventure in Togo: Traditional Leaders Oppressed between State and People (1992), concerns aspects of a democratization process in which the (neo)traditional authority plays an important role. (For further particulars see ‘About the Contributors’ in issue 29.)

FONS STRIJBOSCH holds the chair in Folk Law and Legal Pluralism in the Law Faculty of the Catholic University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is executive secretary of the Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism. He has been conducting legal anthropological research in the Moluccan community in the Netherlands since 1983. His publications on Moluccan law include: ‘The concept of Pèla and its social significance in the community of Moluccan immigrants in the Netherlands’, JLP 23: 177-208 (1985), and ‘Informal social security among Moluccan immigrants in the Netherlands’, pp. 169-85 in F. von Benda-Beckmann et al. (eds.), Between Kinship and the State: Social Security and Law in Developing Countries, Dordrecht: Foris (1988). He edited (with K. von Benda-Beckmann) Anthropology of Law in the Netherlands, Dordrecht: Foris (1985). He is currently as guest editor (with C. Greenhouse) preparing a special issue of JLP containing papers presented at a symposium of the Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism in Zagreb, 1988, on ‘Legal Pluralism in Industrial Societies’.

S. GEORGE VINCENTNATHAN is Professor of Criminal Justice at Aurora University, Aurora, Illinois, USA. He has a doctoral degree in Criminology and an M.A. in Anthropology, both from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in Sociology from Annamalai University in India. He has taught in India and the US and has done research in India, the US and Japan. His research and publications are in the area of victimology and the comparative study of crime, and law and society. He has recently been engaged in the study of social structure and dispute settlement in relation to village panchayats in India, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The article published in this Number presents a part of the findings of this study, conducted between 1988 and 1990.

GORDON R. WOODMAN is an editor of JLP. He holds the degrees of B.A. (in Law), LL.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Britain. He taught and did research at law faculties in Ghana and Nigeria for 15 years before returning to Britain in 1976 to join the Law Faculty of the University of Birmingham, where he has remained since. He writes on African law and legal pluralism generally. He is a past President of the Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism. Among his recent publications is Customary Land Law in the Ghanaian Courts, Legon, Ghana: Ghana Universities Press, 1992.

AUWALU H. YADUDU is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Islamic Law in the Faculty of Law, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. He holds the degrees of LL.B. (1978) from Bayero University, and LL.M. (1982) and S.J.D. (1985) from Harvard Law School. He qualified as a barrister-at-law at the Nigerian Law School in 1979, and worked as a State Counsel for the Ministry of Justice, Kano State before taking up his present position. He worked as a Teaching Assistant, Law and Economic Change in Africa at Harvard Law School in 1984, returning into residence there for the Fall of 1989 as a Visiting Scholar and Teaching Assistant, Comparative Constitutional Law: Constitutions of the Third World. He was a member of Nigeria’s Constitution Review Committee in 1987, and subsequently a member of the Constituent Assembly. He has published several articles and papers in scholarly journals, mainly on law reform and the legal system in Nigeria.