Your Wife Deserves this Diamond

Not law related, but hey.

Just read Renee Rose Shield's Diamond Stories and it rocked. Is basically an ethnography of NY's diamond district, it's history, development, rituals, and suchlike.

Here's a gem:

"The most striking symbol of [Non-Jewish traders'] accommodation is that no matter the ethnicity or nationality, the words that close a business transaction are always the Yiddish mazal und brucha or simply mazal [luck and blessing, or luck].

And for you ADR buffs, there's a tasty chapter on how the DDC uses arbitration to keep the industry working and maintain the trust that is so important when you're handing a $100,000 rock in an envelope over to a guy for no collateral.

I don't know from the colonizing gaze, but this is such a well-written and interesting book. Am tempted to have a look at some of the others, of which there are 40, in this "Anthropology of Contemporary Issues" series edited by Roger Sanjek. Let's hear it for Cornell UP and wily anthropologists everywhere.

And for those of you using the Butler stacks, I'll have it back tomorrow, which should put it back on the shelves just after finals.

As it happens, Barak Richman has a recent article on this topic in the June 2006 issue of Law and Social Inquiry.