This volume closely examines a single canonical article and how it continues to shape the future of sociolegal studies.

Part I. Introduction and Contextualization: 1. Revisiting the oven bird's song Mary Nell Trautner; 2. The oven bird's song: insiders, outsiders, and personal injuries in an American community David M. Engel; 3. Emulating Sherlock Holmes: the dog that didn't bark, the victim who didn't sue, and other contradictions of the 'hyper-litigious' society Barbara Yngvesson; 4. Karl's law school, or the oven bird in Buffalo Alfred S. Konefsky; Part II. The Oven Bird's Insights into the Legal System and Legal Process: 5. Challenging legal consciousness: practice, institutions, and varieties of resistance Anna-Maria Marshall; 6. Client selection: how lawyers reflect and influence community values Lynn Mather; 7. Do jurors hear the oven bird's song? Valerie P. Hans; 8. Having a right but using it too: 'The Oven Bird's Song' about contracts Stewart Macaulay; Part III. Insiders, Outsiders, Class Conflict, and Difference: 9. Indigenous litigiousness: the oven bird's song and the miner's canary Eve Darian-Smith; 10. Listening for the songs of others: insiders, outsiders, and the legal marginalization of the working underclass in America Michael McCann; 11. Racing the oven bird: criminalization, rightlessness, and the politics of immigration Jamie Longazel; 12. Irresponsible matter: sublunar dreams of injury and identity Anne Bloom; 13. Student perceptions of (their) place in relationship to 'The Oven Bird's Song' Renee Ann Cramer; Part IV. Conflict and Law in Other Cultures: 14. The songs of other birds Anya Bernstein; 15. Imagined community and litigation behavior: the meaning of automobile compensation lawsuits in Japan Yoshitaka Wada; 16. Can 'The Oven Bird' migrate north of the border? Annie Bunting; Part V. Afterward: 17. Looking backward, looking forward: past and future lives of 'The Oven Bird's Song' David M. Engel.