An important area of sociolegal research is the study of the ways in which law and culture interact in structuring how people make sense of their world. While cultural systems constantly change and affect legal systems as well as the everyday assumptions of people who deal with them, opportunities are rare to study the nature and sources of change and whether these changes reflect indigenous influences or more global developments. This study of Islamic law aims to make such a contribution. The project itself will be centered on the legal and social system of Morocco where Islamic law is distinctive for the judge's reliance on a set of common sense cultural assumptions. The research design calls for examining data on Islamic law collected in the 1960's in comparison to contemporary data. It is hypothesized that common sense cultural conceptions of causation, probability, and intent are manifested in legal interactions where there is a necessity to manipulate and debate these terms explicitly. Thus, by studying legal proceedings and conversations about such proceedings, it will be possible to detect gradual transformations in the culture as a whole as well as in the nature of law in Moroccan society. Intensive interviews, courtroom observation, and conversational analysis will be used to consider how conceptual changes are developing and how indigenous alterations affect social relations, assessment of land tenure disputes, and modes of characterizing other person's states of mind. This study, by comparing discourse and action across time, provides a unique opportunity for exploration of the roots of sociocultural change and the impact of the conceptual changes on legal systems. The research also promises to have important implications not only for understanding the changes which have occurred in the societies of North Africa in recent decades and but also for what is occuring now. As such, the project will contribute to basic knowledge and theories in both law and social science and cultural anthropology.
