Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage

In this article, I draw on ethnography in the particular zone of engagement between anthropologists, on the one hand, and human rights lawyers who are skeptical of the human rights regime, on the other hand. I argue that many of the problems anthropologists encounter with the appropriation and marginalization of anthropology\u27s analytical tools can be understood in terms of the legal character of human rights. In particular, discursive engagement between anthropology and human rights is animated by the pervasive instrumentalism of legal knowledge. I contend that both anthropologists who seek to describe the culture of human rights and lawyers who critically engage the human rights regime share a common problem—that of the “iron cage” of legal instrumentalism. I conclude that an ethnographic method reconfigured as a matter of what I term circling back—as opposed to cultural description—offers a respite from the hegemony of legal instrumentalism

Is New Governance the Ideal Architecture for Global Financial Regulation?

A central challenge for international financial regulatory systems today is how to manage the impact of global systemically important financial institutions (G-SIFIs) on the global economy, given the interconnected and pluralistic nature of regulatory regimes. This paper focuses on the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and proposes a new research agenda for the FSB’s emerging regulatory forms. In particular, it examines the regulatory architecture of the New Governance (NG), a variety of approaches that are supposed to be more reflexive, collaborative, and experimental than traditional forms of governance. A preliminary conclusion is that NG tools may be effective in resolving some kinds of problems in a pluralistic regulatory order, but they are unlikely to be suitable for all problems. As such, this article proposes that analyses of the precise conditions in which NG mechanisms may or may not be effective are necessary. It concludes with some recommendations for improving the NG model

Property as Legal Knowledge: Means and Ends

This article takes anthropologists’ renewed interest in property theory as an opportunity to consider legal theory-making as an ethnographic subject in its own right. My focus is on one particular construct – the instrument, or relation of means to ends, that animates both legal and anthropological theories about property. An analysis of the workings of this construct leads to the conclusion that rather than critique the ends of legal knowledge, the anthropology of property should devote itself to articulating its own means

Representing In-Between: Law, Anthropology, and the Rhetoric of Interdisciplinarity

This article considers how lawyers and nonlawyers discuss the contribution of interdisciplinary scholarship to the law as a means of rethinking the relationship between these differences. The article first examines the arguments of the nineteenth-century lawyer Henry Maine and of the twentieth-century anthropologist Edmund Leach on the subject, and notes the difference between Maine\u27s emphasis on movement from one theoretical discovery to another and Leach\u27s emphasis on creating relationships between disciplines by exploiting a space in between the two. Then, turning to contemporary scholarship in legal anthropology, Law and Society, and the sociology of law, the article critiques the rigid opposition between disciplines at the heart of much of this scholarship and argues that the task of relating law and anthropology as disciplines, or law and society as social forms, has now lost its rhetorical force. The article concludes that the current contribution of interdisciplinary scholarship to legal studies lies in the tension it discloses between reflexive and normative modes of engagement with legal problems

Models and Documents: Artefacts of International Legal Knowledge

This article draws upon one year of ethnographic research at United Nations conferences to challenge some common academic assumptions about what it means to do international law. The article compares the work of academic international lawyers - founded in making models of an international system - to the work of practitioners - exemplified by the work of making documents, and demonstrates the particular, peculiar nature of each kind of knowledge, from the point of view of the observer. This leads to a set of conclusions concerning how an academic study of international law influenced by an appreciation of the particularity of its own aesthetics might be transformed to accommodate other understandings of what it means to practice international law

Wigmore\u27s Treasure Box: Comparative Law in the Era of Information

This article revisits the work of a canonical but quixotic figure in early American comparative law, John Henry Wigmore, as a lens through which to imagine what comparative law\u27s role might be in the era of globalization. Wigmore\u27s pictorial method , compared here to the treasure boxes of Ming and Ch\u27ing Dynasty Chinese emperors, in which precious objects of different scales and eras were appreciated aesthetically side by side, presents a challenge to the many modernist approaches to comparative law in existence today. An exploration of the intellectual history of comparative law through the disjuncture of Wigmore\u27s work engenders a treatment of comparative legal theories as paradigmatic artifacts of modernist knowledge practices and offers a perspective on what might be missing from that tradition and what might be its contribution in an era of information overload

Wigmore\u27s Shadow

Riles relates how John H. Wigmore, professor and Dean of the Northwestern Law School, fanned her interest in legal and literary fiction. Wigmore provided dozens of examples of legal fictions bundled together in the singular, and seemingly straightforward technical device of modern collateral. From this premise, she analyzes the difference between a legal fiction and a literary fiction, and examines the factors that make legal fiction distinctively legal