E. Adamson Hoebel

Who was E. Adamson Hoebel?

E. Adamson Hoebel was Regents Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He held a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University, where he also attended the seminars of Karl N. Llewellyn, who taught at the Columbia Law School from 1925-1951. Llewellyn 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 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 for a number of years at New York University and subsequently at the University of Utah, where he was also Dean of the University College. He served as a Fullbright Professor in anthropology at Oxford and law at Catholic University of Leuven. At the University of Minnesota he chaired the Department of Anthropology until his retirement in 1972.