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

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

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

Rights Inside Out: The Case of the Women\u27s Human Rights Campaign

This essay traces the relationship between activists and academics involved in the campaign for “women’s rights as human rights” as a case study of the relationship between different classes of what I call “knowledge professionals” self-consciously acting in a transnational domain. The puzzle that animates this essay is the following: how was it that at the very moment at which a critique of “rights” and a reimagination of rights as “rights talk” proved to be such fertile ground for academic scholarship did the same “rights” prove to be an equally fertile ground for activist networking and lobbying activities? The paper answers this question with respect to the work of self-reflexivity in creating a “virtual sociality of rights.