Living without Law

A study of Quaker decision-taking, seen as a form of dispute avoidance, and Quaker dispute resolution. At its core is an ethnography of one Quaker meeting, a faith group which meets for worship at a Quaker Meeting House. Thus the focus of the book is on one particular community. The first part of the study sets out those arguments within the academic legal community that the authors believe the book relates to and which its conclusions are aimed at. The second part considers the essential elements of this history and gives some information about contemporary British Quakers. Because of its special significance to this work, Chapter 4 of the second part explores the theory of Quaker decision-taking, the Quaker business method. The final part of the book discusses the method the authors used to acquire the information which forms the basis of their analysis, the findings that came from the use of that method and the conclusions that they have derived from it.