"Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev" is the first comprehensive study of Bedouin law published in English, including oral, pre-modern law. The material for the book, collected over the course of forty years of field work by Clinton Bailey, one of the world's leading scholars on Bedouin culture, is of permanent scholarly value. Bailey shows how a nomadic desert-dwelling society provides for its own law and order in the traditional absence of any centralized authority or enforcement agency to protect it. This comprehensive picture of Bedouin law offers readers a unique opportunity to understand Bedouin jurisprudence by highlighting the close connection between the law and the culture from which it emerged.

Clinton Bailey is a Research Fellow on Bedouin culture at Trinity College, Hartford. He has been an advocate and activist on behalf of Bedouin civil rights in Israel since 1978 and has served as consultant on Bedouin culture to the BBC, the British Museum, and the Museum of Bedouin Culture in Kibbutz Lahav, Israel. He is the author of A Culture of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs from Sinai and the Negev, published by Yale University Press; and Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture.

"Bailey''s book is not only original, but extremely important, as it broadens the range of literature available on the Bedouin."--Benjamin Saidel, East Carolina University

--Benjamin Saidel