| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.1

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.1 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–1917. By Jane Burbank (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004. xxxiii plus 375 pp. $49.95).
This excellent study of peasant use of township courts brings attention to ways in which Russian peasants employed legal institutions originated by the state to meet their local and individual needs. In doing so, the book challenges common conceptions of peasants' interactions with each other and with the state.	1
The book questions previous depictions of the Russian peasantry as a "backward, disorderly, and uncivilized" (5) collective. To do so, the monograph examines the township courts and through them rural legal culture; that is, the way in which peasants used the courts and accepted their legitimacy. The Russian government instituted the township courts in 1861 in order to provide peasants a forum in which to handle minor suits and petty crime. The book argues that peasants accepted these courts as a "means of resolving conflicts," that peasants "shaped" Russia's legal culture, and that their experience with these courts "constituted an unrecognized foundation for a law-based polity." (5)	. . .

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