Entity | E. Adamson Hoebel

E. Adamson Hoebel (1906–1993) was Regents Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Having studied under Franz Boas, he held a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. There he also attended the seminars of Karl N. Llewellyn, who taught at the Columbia Law School from 1925–1951. Llewellyn (1893–1962) 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 (1941) 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 at New York University from 1929 to 1948, and subsequently at the University of Utah, 1948 to 1954, where he was also dean of the University College (Arts and Sciences). He served as a Fulbright professor in anthropology at Oxford and law at Catholic University of Leuven. He retired in 1972 as Regents' Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota after teaching there for 18 years, 15 of them as head of the department. He served as president of the American Ethnological Society and the American Anthropological Association.