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The Oven Bird's Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

David M. Engel
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Abstract

In “Sander County” Illinois, concerns about litigiousness in the local population tended to focus on personal injury suits, although such cases were very rarely brought. This article explores the roots of these concerns in the ideology of the rural community and in the reactions of many residents to social, cultural, and economic changes that created a pervasive sense of social disintegration and loss. Personal injury claims are contrasted with contract actions, which were far more numerous yet were generally viewed with approval and did not give rise to perceptions of litigiousness or greed. The distinction is explained in terms of changing conceptions of the community itself and in terms of the problematic relationships between “insiders” and “outsiders” in Sander County.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , 1984 , pp. 551 - 582
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

*

The title refers to Robert Frost's poem “The Oven Bird,” which describes a response to the perception of disintegration and decay not unlike the response that is the subject of this paper:

      There is a singer everyone has heard,
      Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
      Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
      He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
      Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
      He says the early petal-fall is past
      When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
      On sunny days a moment overcast;
      And comes that other fall we name the fall.
      He says the highway dust is over all.
      The bird would cease and be as other birds
      But that he knows in singing not to sing.
      The question that he frames in all but words
      Is what to make of a diminished thing.

From The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, © 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Copyright 1944 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers.

**

I am deeply grateful to the residents of “Sander County” for their generous participation in this study. I would also like to thank the following friends and colleagues who read and commented on this article at one stage or another in its development: Richard L. Abel, James B. Atleson, Guyora Binder, Donald Black, Marc Galanter, Fred Konefsky, Virginia Leary, Richard O. Lempert, Felice J. Levine, John Henry Schlegel, Eric H. Steele, Robert J. Steinfeld, and Barbara Yngvesson. I am also grateful to Linda Kosinski for her skill and patience in typing and retyping the manuscript.

The research on which this article is based was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SOC 77-11654 and by the American Bar Foundation. Opinions, findings, and conclusions are those of the author and not of the supporting organizations.

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