Today's guest is UB Law Professor David M. Engel. He will be talking with UB Law Professor Rebecca French about his current paper, "Reading the Landscape of Injury: The Lost Pathway to Law," taking a new look at legal pluralism in contemporary Thailand.

The theme music is Baja Taxi by Brain Buckit, and is available through the Podsafe Music Network.

UBLaw20070416.mp3

Playing time: 27:24

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Excerpt from the introduction:

This study draws on research conducted in Chiangmai over a thirty year period. It will suggest that two different kinds of legality were inscribed on the Thai landscape during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The legal system associated with the modern Thai state imagines space from the outside in. It draws a jurisdictional perimeter around the space it claims. It names the people and objects within that space and defines their relationships, rights, and obligations. It provides institutions and procedures for regulating social interactions – including injuries – within the space it has enclosed. The question facing those who would invoke this type of law is whether they possess what Bourdieu (1977: 40) calls “the capital of authority” sufficient to pursue an “officializing strategy” and persuade legal officials to convert a personal interest “into disinterested, collective, publicly avowable, legitimate interests.”


A second kind of legality in Thailand imagines space from the inside out. It is more concerned with the distinctive features of the physical landscape and the human communities that are, to a large degree, extensions of the landscape. It is less concerned with external boundary lines. This type of legality emanates outward from centers of authority, which are associated with sacred pillars, shrines, temples, villages, trees, and mountains. Near the center, such legal systems are strongest and can command the acquiescence of persons involved in injury cases. The identities of such people were shaped from birth by the sacred centers, which govern many important aspects of life and human interaction. The question facing those who would invoke this second type of law is whether they are sufficiently proximate – spatially, socially, and culturally – to the sacred center, since these legal systems grow weaker with distance. In modern Thailand, both forms of legality must be considered ideal types, for neither is fully realized in practice. The interaction between them is perhaps their most important feature. But equally important is the rapid transformation of Thai society that has been underway for at least two decades. These changes have transformed and diminished the radiating effects of sacred centers of authority and, consequently, have altered the identities and beliefs of ordinary Thai citizens. As a result, injuries have undergone a dual process of re-localization and de-localization. As individuals live their lives and engage in social interactions far removed from the sacred centers of the traditional landscape, injuries become “re-localized” as individual identities and attachments shift to new places, new communities, and new centers of authority. At the same time, injuries become “de-localized” as people adopt new ways of thinking that make location irrelevant to their identities and their social interactions.

Transformations of the landscape of injury have changed the relationship between the two types of legality in Thailand and have affected the salience of state law. One might even say that the transformation of the landscape of injuries has left Thai people bereft of any form of law and without any workable remedy when they suffer harm at the hands of another person.

David M. Engel is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Director of International Programs for the University at Buffalo Law School. From 1991 to 2001, he served as Director of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy and as Vice Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies. At the Law School, he teaches courses on Torts and Products Liability and seminars on Injuries and on Law, Culture, and Society. He is faculty adviser to the Asian Law Students Association and is a member of UB's Council on International Studies and Programs and its Asian Studies Advisory Council, which he chaired from 1999-2001.

Engel's research deals with law and society in the United States and in other countries, particularly Thailand, where he has lived, worked, and taught over a period of nearly thirty-five years. He has studied litigation, conflict, and legal consciousness in communities in the American Midwest and in Thailand. In addition, he has conducted research on the effects of Special Education Law on the families of children with disabilities and their interactions with school district administrators. With his colleague, Frank W. Munger, he published Rights of Inclusion: Law and Identity in the Life Stories of Americans with Disabilities (2003), dealing with the effects of legal rights created by the Americans with Disabilities Act on the lives and careers of men and women with disabilities. He is currently engaged in an interview-based study of injuries and social change in Thailand. A theme common to all of his research is the significance of cultural practices and legal consciousness for the workings of law and legal institutions. Engel is an active member of the Law & Society Association, an international membership organization in which he served as President from 1997-1998. He has also served as a member of the Advisory Panel of the National Science Foundation Program for Law and Social Sciences and the LSAC Grants Sub-Committee.