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Encountering Amateurism: John Henry Wigmore And The Uses Of American Formalism, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This article explores the productive uses of amateurism in comparative law through a close reading of the life and work of John Henry Wigmore, the founder of the American tradition of comparative law who first came to the subject as a young missionary for the Langdellian style of American legal education in turn-of-the-century Japan. Drawing on anthropological and linguistic theory, the article explains amateurism as a post-Realist epithet for formalism. It seeks to counter the received view of the discipline as a pure product of American and European critiques of legal classicism by demonstrating how Wigmore's turn to the performative …