Book excerpt: Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev is the first comprehensive study of Bedouin law published in English, including oral, pre-modern law. The material for the book, collected over the course of forty years of field work by Clinton Bailey, one of the world's leading scholars on Bedouin culture, is of permanent scholarly value. Bailey shows how a nomadic desert-dwelling society provides for its own law and order in the traditional absence of any centralized authority or law enforcement agency to protect it. This comprehensive picture of Bedouin law, offers readers a unique opportunity to understand Bedouin law by highlighting the close connection between the law and the culture from which it emerged.