Theorizing Gypsy Law

The recent study of Gypsy law by Weyrauch and Bell in the Yale Law Journal has been widely circulated, often in second and third generation xerox copies, among European Romani intellectuals. It has also brought Romani social control mechanisms into the mainstream of legal philosophy. They take them as an example of autonomous lawmaking, which serves to maintain internal order and control, while at the same time unifying and protecting Gypsies and Gypsy traditions against potentially hostile host societies. Their examination, however is limited to the system built around the kris of the Vlach Rom, and they fail to see the relevance of other forms of Gypsy social control such as the blood-feud of the Finnish Kaale Rom, which they rule out of their discussion. This limits their understandings of the possibilities within the operation of Romani law and indeed of the kris itself. This paper argues that in fact there is a structural inversion between kris systems and blood feud systems, which shows how similar value-systems can be enforced via very different forms of social control. It is suggested that the different forms of social control are appropriate to different nomadic and sedentary modes of life in different Romani groups, and in fact, using the theories of Pashukanis, one might theorize the kris as an embryonic state developing a criminal law from the historically prior civil law embodied in the norms of Gypsy groups regulating conflicts through the feud system. These contrasts enable a deeper understanding of Gypsy lawmaking processes, which resolve some of the problems shared both by Weyrauch and Bell, and by their critics, such as Reisman.