ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 11 No. 12 (December 2001) pp. 583-586.


GYPSY LAW: ROMANI LEGAL TRADITIONS AND CULTURE by Walter O. Weyrauch (Editor). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 310pp. Cloth $60.00. ISBN: 0-520-22185-0. Paper $24.95. ISBN: 0-520-22186-9.

Reviewed by Gerald M. Pops, Division of Public Administration, West Virginia University.

The subtitle of this book is more descriptive of the actual content than the title. This is a book putatively on legal tradition, but in a more real sense it is about the people, their customs, institutions, threats of destruction, and methods of survival. It is a welcome addition to a literature that is scant, largely because of the secretiveness and closed nature of Gypsy society, especially in the United States. In the forward, Angela Harris cogently notes that the ROMA (often used synonymously, but not quite correctly, for "Gypsies") have always hidden their institutions and values from the dominant culture as a survival strategy, and that this volume of work may bring new and unwelcome exposure. Since the Roma do not willingly or eagerly share knowledge of their institutions with non-Gypsies
(or "gaje"), this volume, as the first to collect general scholarly contributions from a wide variety of North American social scientists, linguists, and lawyers, runs the risk of "getting it wrong." Like those who approach the proverbial elephant blindfolded, any reviewer of these authors, myself included, is necessarily operating from a scant background of experience and insight.

We must start somewhere, as the Gypsies rarely write about themselves. What better place to start than with Walter O. Weyrauch who, with Maureen Anne Bell, wrote and published the seminal article on Gypsy legal traditions almost a decade ago in the YALE LAW JOURNAL? Gratefully, the essay, which is the most complete description of the Gypsy forum for resolving disputes (known as the "Kris-Romani") as often practiced in the United States but also in many other countries, is included in full in the book. In addition, some of the leading Gypsiologists have added their contributions. The result is a rich mosaic and distillation of law, culture, comparative analysis, and often, wisdom. To step into this field is a passage into another mode of thought, a trail to the past laden with the raw conflict of the Gypsy peoples' clashes with many societies, as they struggled against domination in the many lands in which this they lived or through which they passed. Their
unusual (for the host culture) beliefs and behavioral habits have been officially repressed, but survive. For a social scientist or lawyer used to the often dry, rational tone of scholarly analysis, it makes for a refreshing and fascinating read.

The Gypsies are a race, descended from a Hindu, likely military, caste in northern India which fled as a single group from that area around the year 1025 A.D. in the face of Moslem invasions. Spreading over the globe and eventually splintering among many nations since that time, the Gypsies may today be described as a multi-ethnic race. They are very diverse in their ways, but somewhat miraculously retain a generally common set of customs, social institutions, and the Romani language,

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despite centuries of living apart and creating no written history. This is particularly true of the Vlax-Rom, a group of several million Gypsies who emerged from slavery in Romania/Wallachia in the 1850s and who now make up the majority of Gypsies in the western hemisphere, including the United States and Canada. It is the Vlax-Rom about which scholars know the most and who constitute the bulk of Gypsies in the western world. The preoccupation with them represents an important limitation on what may be said about Gypsy institutions. These limitations are recognized in the editor's note on terminology and in the forward (Most Gypsies regard the term "Gypsy" as a negative term and prefer "Rom" or "Roma." The difficulty is that these latter terms do not cover all the Gypsies and is thus not as correct. Both terms are used throughout the book. Also, a small glossary of Romani terms is included).

The authors do an admirable job describing Romani law and considering its relationship to dominant legal cultures. Indeed, the major value of the work may not be so much in capturing the nature of the Romani legal system, which, by the way, the readings accomplish. Rather, our attention is directed to a consideration of what the study of such a private legal system teaches us about our own legal institutions, about their characteristics and their inadequacies, but especially about how they exist primarily to support and regulate the attributes of our prevailing national culture and may unwittingly repress a sub-cultural group of people. A legal system, whether oral or written, must perform certain social and economic functions, and ROMANIYA is not exceptional in this regard. It may hold clues for how the
dominant society may better perform its legal functions.

Many of the authors are overtly aware of the potential role they may play in compromising the existing power relations between the dominant society and the ROM community by the mere act of observing. For example, will the disclosure that there are often local agreements to allow the ROMA to keep the police out of their community and allow them to solve their own problems adversely affect this live-and-let-live arrangement? A sensitive group of authors they are-legal scholars, social scientists, a historiographer, linguists, an anthropologist, and a journalist. All have written other works on Gypsies for which they have received critical acclaim.

Take the work of Anne Sutherland as an example (Chapter 10- "Complexities of U.S. Law and Gypsy Identity"). She addresses conflicts between sedentary societies (like the American) and nomadic societies (like the Gypsy). She notes how Gypsies, in the seemingly legitimate attempt to act Gypsy, often run afoul of the American criminal justice system. The piece is highly insightful in describing the irrelevancy or misguidedness of always applying U.S. law to members of special communities. Doing so often has devastating and unjust results, even results that guardians of the dominant legal system would find abhorrent ASSUMING THEY UNDERSTOOD THAT IT WAS THEIR ACTIONS LEADING TO THE RESULTS. To understand these unintended and harmful causal linkages could lead useful reforms that could be applied to official relationships to other sub-cultural groups as well as to Gypsies. This is an underlying, usually implicit, theme of this excellent book.

A poignant illustration of the malevolence of this cultural collision of law systems relates to confinement within a gajikane prison or jail. The act of conviction and sentence may not be seen as a

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moral sanction in a Gypsy community, but the condition of BEING CONFINED is a polluting act that threatens expulsion from the Gypsy community, and may even
be life-threatening. This is so because the imprisoned Gypsy must exist in an environment of non-Gypsies, fellow inmates and guards, who perform acts, which according to Gypsy laws of purity and impurity (marime), are of unspeakable vulgarity that defile the Gypsies in their presence. Even those Gypsies who are American citizens may understand little about the criminal justice systems they wittingly or unwittingly enter, suffer privation not intended by those systems, and, because of language, education, or lack of understanding of the dominant criminal laws, often are unable to receive adequate legal defense. As these illustrations expand (making fortune-telling illegal, punishing vagrancy, etc.), a picture emerges of the "criminalization" of Gypsy life by virtue of the actions of the external culture and not as the result of the sub-cultural group itself (see pp. 6-9).

The article by Weyrauch and Bell serves as the basic descriptive piece on the private law system of the Vlax-Rom. As they note, the basic purposes are not only to protect Gypsies from external and internal threats, but also include the goal of organizing Gypsy society:

"An important goal of this essay is to demonstrate that the Gypsy legal system not only protects the Gypsies from external and internal threats, but it also serves as a code that organizes Gypsy society. In particular, Gypsy law has evolved to insulate Gypsies from the host society, and thus to maintain its own insularity from the host legal system" (p. 27).


For those who wish "to do justice," much insight may be gained into Gypsy culture and ought to become mandatory reading for gaje that are likely to bring the dominant legal culture to bear on the Rom community.

In "Gypsy Law and Jewish Law," Calum Carmichael paints a picture of comparisons between these two trans-national peoples. Although there are intriguing crossovers regarding impurity (of food and bodily functions), avoidance of learning that could contradict deeply held beliefs, deception of outsiders with the purpose of protecting the community, and protection of odd rules to preserve cultural identity, the author's conclusion is that the differences overwhelm the similarities. The Jews are zealous writers and chroniclers and debaters of law; Gypsies pass on traditions from generation to generation orally through a system of elders, with little debate and the acceptance of authority. Still, the very study of these unusual (to the dominant culture) legal systems throws light upon universal aspects of law
that can help to inform and strengthen our dominant legal system.

In "The Rom-Vlach Gypsies and the Kris-Romani," Ronald Lee, a Canadian of Gypsy descent, paints a picture of decline of the kris, in both its reach and its ability to administer problems in the U.S. and Canada. Purity and pollution issues are declining in relation to economic issues (payment of bridal dowry, territorial disputes over fortune-telling concessions, for example). Much is learned about the types of disputes that are handled in the kris, including: occupations permitted to males, sex life, household rituals, responsibility for accidents, and so forth. This makes fascinating reading in which the process of the kris is tied to social customs. Lee
explains, and demonstrates clearly, that ROMANIYA Is based on ancient folk


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religion.

In all, this book is a welcome, and very much needed, addition to the narrow shelf of literature on Gypsy law and culture, especially from a North American perspective. It should be read and kept as a reference by social scientists who study comparative culture as well as legal scholars who reflect on the relationships between law and culture.

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Copyright 2001 by the author, Gerald M. Pops.