SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AT THE DISTRICT COURTS.

A district headquarters town In India is, virtually by definition, the seat of a whole complex of law courts. The personnel whose activities contribute to the patterning of social life in such towns includes as an essential feature a small brotherhood of local legal practitioners. This article describes one such brotherhood: the advocates who practice in a district headquarters town in Haryana, India. It is mainly concerned with isolating and describing the system of social relations, the inter-connected set of behavioral patterns, that occurs in the daily interactions among a hundred or more professionals in the district courts. For the litigants of an Indian district, the courts are an important occasional social arena. For even the busiest of chronic litigants, however, they are only an occasional arena. The professional and administrative personnel of the legal system are necessarily somewhat marginal figures in the litigant's world, of not as much concern to him as the allies and opposite parties of his numerous lawsuits. For a vast majority of district legal practitioners in India, on the other hand, the courts are the arena, the physical and social setting, for a lifetime's work.