One of the most time-honored approaches to the study of dispute processing by law and society scholars is to choose a particular community or locale and to ask how local residents handle instances of conflict.
Very often, answering this question requires the researcher to explore a variety of local level procedÂures and institutions, including mediation by respected elders or local leaders. The case study method is typically favored in this type of close-textured study of dispute processing. The following excerpt from an ethnographic study by Fernanda Pirie in Ladakh, in the Kashmir region of India, illustrates this approach particularly well.
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