Celebrating “The Oven Bird’s Song” — Buffalo, NY

Celebrating "The Oven Bird's Song"

The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, SUNY Buffalo Law School, presents Celebrating “The Oven Bird’s Song” Oct. 23, 2015. Cosponsors are SUNY Buffalo Law School, UB Humanities Institute, and UB Department of Sociology.

Just over thirty years ago, David Engel published “The Oven Bird’s Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community” in Law and Society Review. Engel’s research revealed the attitudes that residents in a rural Illinois community brought to contested cultural issues regarding personal injury, dispute resolution, social change, and law. The article quickly became one of the signature contributions to the law and society movement, a kind of instant classic.

Join us at the Baldy Center on October 23, 2015 for a one-day conference that will take a full measure of the article and its impact from the vantage points of the varied disciplines that inform sociolegal studies. The symposium will examine the intellectual context within which the article was written, its effect on interdisciplinary studies of institutional actors, the pedagogical opportunities and challenges presented by the work, and the continuing influence of “The Oven Bird’s Song” on law and society scholarship.

Hat tip: Faculty Awareness Blog.

About the author

Reference librarian, University of Washington School of Law