Miners' Justice: Migration, Law and Order on the Alaska-Yukon Frontier, 1873-1902

by Thomas Stone

A study in the ethnology of law, Miners' Justice analyzes the evolution of institutions of conflict management, their effectiveness in limiting the potential for intracommunity violence, and their relationship to changing demographic and social conditions in the 19th century Yukon and Alaska goldfields. Anthropologists have given considerable attention to the effects of migration and mobility patterns upon the functioning of legal institutions in societies of foragers and preindustrial cultivators. This study serves to demonstrate how such patterns can also affect the functioning of local legal institutions in communities spawned by the economy of a complex, industrial society.

308 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988