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Is The Law Hopeful?, Annelise Riles
Is The Law Hopeful?, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
This essay asks what legal studies can contribute to the now vigorous debates in economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literary studies and anthropology about the nature and sources of hope in personal and social life. What does the law contribute to hope? Is there anything hopeful about law? Rather than focus on the ends of law (social justice, economic efficiency, etc.) this essay focuses instead on the means (or techniques of the law). Through a critical engagement with the work of Hans Vaihinger, Morris Cohen and Pierre Schlag on legal fictions and legal technicalities, the essay argues that what is “hopeful” …
The Anti-Network: Private Global Governance, Legal Knowledge, And The Legitimacy Of The State, Annelise Riles
The Anti-Network: Private Global Governance, Legal Knowledge, And The Legitimacy Of The State, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
Global private law has become the source of both anxiety and euphoria. Inherent in this fascination is the assumption that global private law threatens the legitimacy of the state by taking over its functions through new techniques of governance. In this article, I build upon research in one arena of global private governance, the production of legal documentation for the global swap markets, to challenge the most prominent assumptions about private law beyond the state. I argue that rather than focusing on how global private law is or is not an artifact of state power, a body of private norms, …
Real Time: Governing The Market After The Failure Of Knowledge, Annelise Riles
Real Time: Governing The Market After The Failure Of Knowledge, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
This paper presents an ethnographic account of the work of bureaucrats at the Bank of Japan, Japan's central bank, as they engaged in the construction of a "real time" payments system. The paper aims to consider certain shared dimensions of the knowledge practices of late modern anthropologists and economic planners and the special challenges these pose to the study of modern knowledge. In particular, the paper focuses on the effects of the attraction of "self-sustaining systems" consisting of "two sides." It concludes that one central challenge of new ethnographic subjects such as global financial markets is to find ways of …
Placeholders: Engaging The Hayekian Critique Of Financial Regulation, Annelise Riles
Placeholders: Engaging The Hayekian Critique Of Financial Regulation, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
Since Friedrich Hayek, debates about the proper relationship between the state and the market, and about the optimal design of regulatory institutions, often turn on assumptions about the workings of legal expertise — and in particular about the difference between public expertise (bureaucratic knowledge) and private expertise (private law). Hayek’s central argument, adopted uncritically by a wide array of policy-makers and academics across the political spectrum, is a temporal one: bureaucratic reasoning is inherently one step behind the market, and hence effective market planning is impossible. In contrast, Hayek argues, private ordering is superior because it is of the moment, …
Reforming Knowledge? A Socio-Legal Critique Of The Legal Education Reforms In Japan, Annelise Riles, Takashi Uchida
Reforming Knowledge? A Socio-Legal Critique Of The Legal Education Reforms In Japan, Annelise Riles, Takashi Uchida
Annelise Riles
This article critiques the current Japanese legal education reforms, modeled largely on the United States, by proposing a socio-technical framework for analyzing the distribution of legal expertise in a given society. On one side of the spectrum is the "monocentric" model of legal expertise, in which expertise is monopolized by the profession and legal literacy is low. On the other side of the spectrum is the "polycentric" model of legal expertise, in which a range of social and institutional actors share responsibility for legal expertise and legal literacy is high. If the U.S. is a more monocentric system, the Japanese …