Most lawyers are more likely to associate the Cheyennes with high adventure than with juristic insight, and when informed that The Cheyenne Way deals with the dispute settlement processes of an American Indian tribe, they might well conclude that it is no concern of theirs. This would be unfortunate for the substance of the book is less exotic than its title suggests, although its setting and its form are certainly unusual. Indeed, it is a rare example of a book which is at once entertaining and profound and, for this reason, for many people it may be the most suitable introduction to the more general aspects of Llewellyn's thought.

Llewellyn's early acquaintance with the work of Sumner and Keller and his later reading of Max Weber stirred his interest in ‘primitive law’. When he read Malinowski's path-breaking work, Crime and Custom in Savage Society he found it stimulating, but he was irritated by the vagueness and high level of generality of much of the description. Certainly Malinowski's studies of the Trobriand Islanders represented an important advance. He was one of the first anthropologists who actually lived in the community he was studying; he saw more clearly than his predecessors how far the verbalized ideal norms of behaviour–how a people would state their ‘customs’–could deviate from their actual behaviour, and by focusing on practices more than on norms he brought a breath of realism into anthropology.