Legal Ethnography

This article explores the creation, circulation, and regulation of informal trade credit or “ograyi” in Afghanistan. The practice of ograyi allows businesses to access short-term credit, either from their suppliers or third-parties, to acquire specified goods. This paper provides an account of the non-legal practices that regulate ograyi transactions. Ograyi vitally depends on the development of trust between parties. Clientelism helps maintain stable relationships that can offset market unpredictability. Widespread market norms and practices establish the general behaviour of participants. Parties also renegotiate the terms of the contract if circumstances make it impossible for the creditor to repay the loan in the agreed time frame. Furthermore, bank credit remains largely unavailable or unappealing to many businesses, and the legal system provides limited recourse in the case of contractual breach. Thus, the non-legal practices regulating ograyi serve as a substitute for legal coercion.

Cette contribution présente le cours sur les institutions primitives dispensé par l’historien du droit Jacques Flach au Collège de France entre 1892 et 1904. Elle insiste sur la singularité de son approche historique et comparative. Soucieux d’étudier les institutions en contexte, il propose une interprétation inédite de la féodalité, ambitionne d’écrire une histoire globale du droit et cherche à restituer l’altérité institutionnelle des sociétés primitives. Flach est ainsi l’un des premiers à enseigner en France l’anthropologie sociale et juridique.

Book chapter, co-authored with Baudouin Dupret, “La praxeologie du droit: mise en perspective et mise en pratique” (the Praxeology of Law: Putting in Perspective and Putting in Practice) in edited volume by Julie Colemans and Baudouin Dupret ‘Ethnographies du raisonnement juridique’ (Ethnographic Studies of Judicial Reasoning), (Paris, LGDJ, 2018, pp. 223-242).

This article shows that despite the infrequency of federal jury trials in the United States, jurors pervade lawyers’ work. From the earliest stages of their criminal and civil case preparation, the mere possibility that a case will proceed to trial prompts critical consideration of hypothetical jurors’ perspectives. The impact of this consideration is underappreciated by scholars who assume that a decline in the overall number of trials necessarily diminishes lay decision-makers’ value to the legal system. Without disputing this view, this article contributes much-needed nuance by examining the role that jurors play as an ethical resource for federal prosecutors. This study, which draws on five years of participatory research in a U.S. Attorney’s Office including interviews with 133 Assistant U.S. Attorneys, is the first to analyze the role of jurors in federal prosecutors’ decision-making as they evaluate and prepare evidence, witnesses, and ongoing investigations with colleagues and supervisors. It argues that the potential for juror scrutiny compels prosecutors to construct the pursuit of justice around the imperative of appealing to the common sense of an imagined public.

Através de uma série de vinhetas fotográficas da vida cotidiana em Istambul, este artigo explora o Direito Internacional além dos eventos e locais excepcionais frequentemente associados a ele. O artigo desafia o enquadramento do Direito Internacional como um campo estreito de ação e, em vez disso, destaca seu papel expansivo na constituição do nosso mundo.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Direito internacional. Fotografia. Funcionamento cotidiano do direito internacional. Teoria do direito internacional. Antropologia do direito internacional.

Water conflicts across the world are bringing to the fore fundamental challenges to the anthropocentric boundaries of the human rights paradigm. Engaging with the multi-layered legal ethnographic setting of the Xalalá dam project in Maya Q’eqchi’ territory in Guatemala, I will critically and empirically unpack not only the anthropocentric boundaries of the hegemonic human rights paradigm, but also the ontological differences between indigenous and Euro-Western legal conceptualizations of human-water-life. I argue that it is necessary to pave the way for urgent rethinking of the human right to water and, more broadly, human rights beyond the modern divide of nature-culture. International law and human rights scholars should therefore not be afraid of plurilegal water realities and should start engaging with these ontologically different concepts and practices. Embarking on a bottom-up co-theorizing about human and beyond-the-human water rights will be imperative to avoid recolonization of indigenous knowledges-ontologies by non-indigenous scholarships and public policy.

International law is too often represented as existing only in removed spaces and extraordinary events and norms. In understanding international law in this way, the international legal enterprise confirms its authority to enframe certain things as international and others as prosaic, often domestic, lower level occurrences disassociated from the larger mechanics of the world. With the help of photographic vignettes of everyday life in Istanbul, I discuss the critical importance of paying attention to this prosaic, non-exceptional side of the international legal order. [Also available at: http://lril.oxfordjournals.org/content/2/1/3.full]

Legal anthropology and legal sociology have much in common. Traditionally, however, these approaches have tried to maintain disciplinary boundaries toward each other. Latest since the 1990s, these boundaries have become more and more porous and the academic practices of boundary-making do seem to convince practitioners of these fields less and less. The recent emergence of a subfield of the anthropology of the state situated at the interface of legal anthropology, legal sociology, ethnographic studies of bureaucracies and organizational sociology attests to this development. In this introduction, we propose to consciously transgress the traditional boundaries between legal anthropology, legal sociology and the anthropology of the state when it comes to the ethnographic investigation of official law. Based on the contributions to this special issue-consisting of empirical articles and commentaries-we map several avenues for boundary transgressions and the theoretical reconceptualizations these may engender. Among them are: looking at legal institutions of the state as practicing both informal formality and formal informality; moving from socio-spatial metaphors to investigating official law-places and-spaces as ethnographic objects; and studying norm-making within official law as a wider field of practice.

A través de una serie de retratos fotográficos de la vida cotidiana en Estambul, este artículo explora el derecho internacional más allá de los eventos y sitios excepcionales a menudo asociados con él. El artículo cuestiona el encuadramiento del derecho internacional como un campo de acción limitado y en su lugar destaca su rol expansivo en la constitución de nuestro mundo.

Drawing on ethnographic research at a legal aid organization, I analyse the legal brokerage of youths’ asylum applications. As youths increasingly seek asylum alone, the US has adopted policy changes allowing them more favourable access to the asylum process than adults. Despite this opening, I argue that mediating youths’ asylum claims remains challenging. First, youths have more difficulty sharing their stories than adults, and I identify three youth-specific interviewing strategies that legal intermediaries employ to elicit their accounts of forced migration. Second, I analyse how intermediaries edit these accounts to satisfy the asylum system’s expectations about childhood, as well as forced migration, constructing narratives that distance youths from criminalized adult identities and depict them as innocent child-refugees, which configures the asylum process as a victimizing and infantilizing rite of reverse passage.

The article undertakes a genealogy of conceptual definitions of the ‘lore of law’ as a subject of study before the formation of both European legal ethnology and the anthropology of law, mainly within the Historical School of Law in the first half of the nineteenth century. By tracing the way in which the subject ‘lore of law’ has been categorised, the article follows the evolution of its definitions from 18th-century antiquarian legal research, Herder’s view on the law’s orality in original biblical sources, to Jacob Grimm’s understanding of ancient legal customs as part of folk poetry. Grimm’s romantic approach is used to illuminate the distinction of other contemporary approaches, especially the fundamentally opposite pragmatic study of contemporary constitution which has been developed by Joseph Anthon Rieger and Joseph Mader. The ‘lore of law’ seem to have acquired a newfound importance in the period after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire (1806). Particularly its conceptual definitions such as “customary law” and “folk law” are explored as being moulded by new nationalist and universalist patterns of scholarly thought. To conclude, the article foregrounds the expansion of legal horizons traced in this pre-evolution of the ethnological study of law

This article makes propositions on how to ethnographically investigate discourse practice as it is embedded in affective dynamics. Discourse practice events have usually been investigated with a focus on language and speech. Without giving up this focus on the practice of talking, this article argues to understand the linguistic performances as embedded in affective arrangements. By mobilizing the analytical metaphor of the time machine in which past and future appear as re-enactments and pre-enactments, a methodological device is proposed to include broader structural forces and long-term processes in the ethnography of discourse practice. As such, it is in discourse practice events that sentiments become manifest, are enacted, invoked, mobilized, shaped and transformed.

The idea that every species should be assessed, ranked, and listed according to its projected risk of extinction is now a commonly accepted practice in conservation. Threatened species lists rank species in a linear progression from the least to the most endangered. This chapter explores the biopolitical nature of such lists. It shows how listing threatened species becomes a way to affirm — and justify — that life which is more and most important to save. The chapter argues that threatened species lists reinforce biopolitical differentiation not only between perceivably distinct nonhuman species but also between Homo sapiens and nonhuman species.

“I don’t worry about the four-legged animals,” Officer Armatys tells me as I scramble to catch up when he enters a backyard with a fierce-looking dog. “It’s the two-legged animals I am concerned about.” I interviewed Officer Armatys twice, first in his office in the Erie County’s Society for the Protection of Animals (ESPCA) and, a few months later, on a ride-along during a routine workday. Based on these encounters and numerous others with members of the ESPCA and with city administrators of animal control, this essay conveys bits and pieces of the story of how the City of Buffalo polices its nonhuman population. Specifically, I focus on the regulation and enforcement of dog laws in the city, what I refer to as “legal tails.” I argue that although seemingly enacted to control dogs, animal laws and ordinances are very much a way to monitor and control the conduct of humans. In the city, human-animal relations are expressed, regulated, and surveilled more closely than anywhere else. Animal laws instruct us which animals are allowed into the city and under what conditions. More than regulating the everyday of urban life as it pertains to animals, humans, and the interrelations thereof, such laws and their enforcement help define the very essence of the city. Indeed, such regulations and systems of surveillance define not only the limits of human conduct, but also the limits of the city itself. Through its distinct matrix of animal-human relationships, the city is distinguished from its significant other, the country, where a different set of animal-human relations is permitted to take place.

Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research on the central money exchange bazaar in Kabul, Afghanistan-Sarai Shahzada-this article examines the micro-dynamics of legal change within a close-knit community in a fragile setting. For most of its history, the bazaar has been governed by informal legal norms. New state-building measures after 2001 led to increased efforts by the state to regulate the bazaar, causing money exchangers to initiate internal transformations to protect their autonomy. While scholarship generally argues that state coercion substitutes for private legal norms, this study shows the centrality of the state in consolidating the bazaar legal system. Exchangers have cast their non-state legal system in the image of the state by formalizing new operating rules that have introduced a management structure and dispute resolution forum. New state licenses have also helped to safeguard the boundaries of the bazaar. This article contributes to private governance and legal pluralism scholarship by revealing that a private community, even in a fragile state, may be capable of maintaining an autonomous non-state legal system not in spite of, but rather by depending on, the state.

Anthropological and legal literatures often claim that the anthropology of law is a boundary discipline between social anthropology and legal studies. From this point of view, a sharp divide between law and culture is an indispensable prerequisite for any smooth interdisciplinary collaboration between social anthropologists and legal scholars as well as for combining ethnographic data with legal analyses. This paper, on the other hand, suggests that such joint efforts require a more sophisticated understanding of the mutual relationships between these disciplines and points to their entangled disciplinary beginnings. The social sciences, and social anthropology in particular, established their reflexive empirical methodologies and analytical systems by continually transcending the spatial and temporal boundaries of Western (legal) orthodoxy. Hence, the anthropology of law is seen as a distinctive scientific field, which views the law as an issue of the Other and whose definite theoretical and methodological attitudes are incompatible with both the ethnocentrism of conventional jurisprudence and the understanding of the Otherness in non-legal anthropology.

This interview with Prabha Kotiswaran, Professor of Law and Social Justice at King's College, London focuses, among others, on the many dimensions of post-colonial feminist legal education and scholarship; her own scholarly journey across three continents; insights into the gendered nature of academic labor; the lived dimensions of her feminism, the limitations and possibilities of emerging forms of feminisms in the wake of #MeToo; on her own scholarship on sex work; the misreading of governance feminism; the tradition of materialist feminism; her current project on law and social reproduction; and the imperative for strengthening solidarity between the women's and labor movements in India.

How do law-in-action and science-in-action approaches differ and how can they learn from these differences? In order to answer this question, the author compares two exemplary empirical studies: a study by Paul Drew on cross-examination in court and one reconstruction of a soil science research project by Bruno Latour. As a first step, the article identifies strengths, foci, and framing devices for each study. In a second step, the author contrasts these characteristics. He identifies similarities in terms of the sequential order of legal and scientific activities and differences in terms of the spatiotemporal framings of these activities. In a third part, the author defines a shared problem: the fabrication of lasting and translocal statements. In light of the problem of discoursivation, the two studies appear as complementary. The event-bias of the courtroom study and the process-bias of the laboratory study read as (partial) contributions to the study of discoursivation. The potentials to learn from each other derive from exactly these diverse emphases. By combining staging and mobilisation, the article concludes, law-in-action as well as science-in-action research can draw a denser picture on how ephemerals such as observations or utterances are turned into discursive facts.
ACCE

“Is the Puerto Rican Worth Saving? The Biopolitics of Endangerment and Grievability” describes how threatened species lists elevate listed nonhuman species from the realm of biological life into that of a political life that is both worth saving and worth grieving. The chapter provides a novel perspective on the biopolitics of lists that highlights both their affirmative properties and their acute relevance for understanding the governance of entire nonhuman species.

This article proposes a methodological approach to courtroom ethnography by developing the idea of the courtroom as an affective arrangement. In the courtroom, humans and their linguistic utterances, but also material objects and infrastructures, visuals, voices, and sounds are relationally entangled. This is the analytical entry point for ethnographically describing the atmosphere of a court proceeding without reducing atmosphere either to the result of courtroom talk or to the emotional experiences of the participants. For a thick ethnographic description of courtroom atmospheres, the ethnographer should point out how all kinds of different bodies perform in the theatre of power that is a court proceeding.

In recent decades, the local, the municipal and the city have emerged as virtuous spaces where development and global integration can be achieved in the Third World. In this chapter I argue, however, that this move to the local through the idea of decentralization has had serious political, administrative, financial and jurisprudential implications. Today, Third World subjects find themselves in territories that are increasingly fragmented by sub-national frontiers and regulated by numerous levels of governance and cross-enforcing legal regimes. To illustrate the consequences of this new configuration, I narrate some key moments in the everyday of a group of Internal Displaced People (IDPs) who radically – although ineffectively – challenged the operation of the decentralized development model in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city. The limitations of their protest reveals how in a world in which state power is brought increasingly closer to its subjects, but without sufficient means, the decentralization process becomes an avenue for the domestication of political ambitions. In particular, the legal nature of decentralization enables a systematic administration of state failure through a new geography of power based on the re-spatialization of subjects, the proliferation of authorities, and the disaggregation of lines of responsibility. For those at the margin of this new geography, the outcome of the decentralization project turns out to be the abandonment of the promise of a nascent global order from the local, an outcome that I describe here as part of a pedagogy of disenchantment. The analysis in this chapter calls for a transformation of urban law into a field of legal and political action able to face the challenges of our increasingly decentralized world.

Amos Rapoport is one of the pioneers of the studies on the relationship between people and their environments. At the same time, analyzing the built environment as a factor co-determining human interactions in the courtroom tends to be more and more popular in literature. Following this line, the paper aims to consider whether Rapoport's theoretical framework (especially its part related to non-verbal communication through the environment) could be fruitfully applied to the study of the courtroom in order to shed some light on the spatial, physical, or architectural aspects of the courtroom (which is treated as a particular environment). This paper offers a preliminary examination of the usefulness of Rapoport's framework in reference to the courtroom interior. What needs to be stressed is that, rather than focusing on a given jurisdiction as a point of reference when elaborating on the usefulness of Rapoport's framework, the authors try to examine its general applicability.

Indonesia has probably the fastest changing legal system in the Muslim world. This book represents the first ethnographic account of legal pluralism in the post-conflict and disaster situation in Aceh. It addresses changes in both the national legal system and the regional legal structure in the province.

Focusing on the encounter between diverse patterns of legal reasoning advocated by multiple actors and by different institutions (local, national and international; official and unofficial; judicial, political and social cultural) it considers the vast array of issues arising in the wake of the December 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Aceh.

It investigates disputes about rights to land and other forms of property, power relations, the conflict of rules, gender relationships, the right to make decisions, and prevailing norms. The cases involve various actors from villages, the courts, the provincial government and the legislature, the national Supreme Court and the central government of Indonesia.

Key Features:

- Covers legal disputes surrounding inheritance, marriage and divorce, legislation and law-making, land dispute, non-Muslims and shari'ah, and religious courts

- Includes compelling legal case studies from the post-disaster situation

- Presents law as a site of contestation reflecting the unique set of conflicts arising after the 2004 tsunami

Objects have social lives like humans and are invested with the properties of social relations. We restore performativity to the journeying objects of the Maseit street magicians by drawing on our ethnography with this wayfaring community from Kathputli Colony, Delhi. The shifting social incarnations of the magicians' objects threaten law's desire for semantic closure. Their truncated movements indicate how law traps the fluid history of street magic in a rigid definitional register by criminalising it as begging. By mapping these journeys, we illuminate the ways in which the Maseit make sense of their lives within the legal framework.

Claims that hunters are exemplar conservationists would likely come as a surprise to many. Hunters, after all, kill animals. Isn’t there a better way to appreciate wildlife than to kill and consume it? Yet there is no mistake: wildlife managers frequently make the claim that hunters, in the United States at least, are in fact some of the greatest conservationists. This article explores the complex historical and contemporary entanglements between hunting and wildlife conservation in the United States from a regulatory perspective. Such entanglements are multifaceted: hunting provides substantial financial support for conservation and hunters are the state’s primary tools for managing “big game” populations. Additionally, many wildlife officials are themselves hunters, and wildlife management programs are often geared toward the interests of hunters. Statutes, regulations, and governmental policies have been set in place that both reflect and reinforce this intimate relationship. This article draws on seven in-depth, semi-structured interviews, mainly with government wildlife managers, as well as on my own participatory observations accompanying a wildlife manager on a hunting trip, to trace the interconnections between hunting and conservation and the detailed regulatory regimes that have emerged around them. The management of the white-tailed deer in New York State will serve as a case study for these explorations of how American wildlife officials think about, and practice, their work of governing wildlife hunting.

Until recently, legal ethnography has been understood as an integral part of legal anthropology and its studies of law in particular societies and cultures. In some older national traditions of European legal ethnology, including the Czech tradition, it has been considered a legal rather than a social science. Recent shifts in the perception of ethnography, which is increasingly understood as an autonomous methodology or a technology of knowledge production, are an opportunity to rethink the specific position of legal ethnography. This paper therefore explores the difference between ethnography as it is understood in the anthropology of law and the new relationship of "law and ethnography" as two autonomous variables. On the basis of several recent legal-ethnographic studies, it also seeks to identify the persistent common denominators of both approaches and attempts to show their possible contribution to the traditional methodology of legal research.

New evidence suggests that where an asylum seeker ends up in Britain could have a significant impact on the likelihood that they are granted refugee protection, regardless of whether their life is in danger. From an Afghan child fleeing forced recruitment into the Taliban, to a Ugandan lesbian fleeing police violence, geography seems to be affecting the justice process that asylum seekers often depend upon for their safety and their lives.

In 2017, multiple claims and declarations from around the legal world appeared to signal a tipping point in the global acceptance of a new and evolving legal status for nature. Whether it was litigation in the United States, India, and Colombia, or legislation emanating from New Zealand and Australia, the law seems to be grappling with a new normative order in relation to the legal status of nature. However, this shift has been a long time coming, being at least fortyfive years since Christopher Stone famously asked whether trees should have legal standing.1 This Article explores what this emerging Ecological Jurisprudence means for the legal personhood of rivers. Nature, the environment, and even single complex ecosystems, are seldom easily quantifiable as bounded entities with geographically clear borders. Within the complex spectrum of establishing where a legal subject ends and another begins, however, rivers are more easily identifiable. A river’s very being is premised on hist...

Objects have social lives like humans and are invested with the properties of social relations. We restore performativity to the journeying objects of the Maseit street magicians by drawing on our ethnography with this wayfaring community from Kathputli Colony, Delhi. The shifting social incarnations of the magicians’ objects threaten law’s desire for semantic closure. Their truncated movements indicate how law traps the fluid history of street magic in a rigid definitional register by criminalising it as begging. By mapping these journeys, we illuminate the ways in which the Maseit make sense of their lives within the legal framework.