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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
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” …
Ethnography In The Realm Of The Pragmatic: Studying Pragmatism In Law And Politics, Annelise Riles
Ethnography In The Realm Of The Pragmatic: Studying Pragmatism In Law And Politics, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
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Representing In-Between: Law, Anthropology, And The Rhetoric Of Interdisciplinarity, Annelise Riles
Representing In-Between: Law, Anthropology, And The Rhetoric Of Interdisciplinarity, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
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's emphasis on "movement" from one theoretical discovery to another and Leach's 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 …
Property As Legal Knowledge: Means And Ends, Annelise Riles
Property As Legal Knowledge: Means And Ends, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
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.
Models And Documents: Artefacts Of International Legal Knowledge, Annelise Riles
Models And Documents: Artefacts Of International Legal Knowledge, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
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 …
Wigmore's Treasure Box: Comparative Law In The Era Of Information, Annelise Riles
Wigmore's Treasure Box: Comparative Law In The Era Of Information, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
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's role might be in the era of globalization. Wigmore's "pictorial method", compared here to the "treasure boxes" of Ming and Ch'ing 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's work engenders a treatment …
The View From The International Plane: Perspective And Scale In The Architecture Of Colonial International Law, Annelise Riles
The View From The International Plane: Perspective And Scale In The Architecture Of Colonial International Law, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
No abstract provided.
A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles
A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
This article urges humanistic legal studies to take the technical dimensions of law as a central focus of inquiry. Using archival and ethnographic investigations into developments in American Conflict of Laws doctrines as an example, and building on insights in the anthropology of knowledge and in science and technology studies that focus on technical practices in scientific and engineering domains, it aims to show that the technologies of law - an ideology that law is a tool and an accompanying technical aesthetic of legal knowledge - are far more central and far more interesting dimensions of legal practice than humanists …
Infinity Within The Brackets, Annelise Riles
Infinity Within The Brackets, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
The ethnographic subjects of this article are UN-sponsored international conferences and their legal documents. Drawing upon fieldwork among Fiji delegates at these conferences, in this article I demonstrate the centrality of matters of form, as distinct from questions of “meaning,” in the negotiation of international agreements. A parallel usage of documents and of mats among Fijian negotiators provides a heuristic device for exploring questions of pattern and scale in the aesthetics of negotiation.
Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic And Anthropological Knowledge, Annelise Riles
Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic And Anthropological Knowledge, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
“The Bank of Japan is our mother,” bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan's central bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource, and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw attention to special methodological problems—involving the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception—in the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge practices.
An Ethnography Of Abstractions?, Annelise Riles
Foreword: Transdisciplinary Conflicts Of Law, Ralf Michaels, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles
Foreword: Transdisciplinary Conflicts Of Law, Ralf Michaels, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
This introduction to our co-edited special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems addresses how interdisciplinary studies might contribute to the revitalization of the field of Conflict of Laws. The introduction surveys existing approaches to interdisciplinarity in conflict of laws - drawn primarily from economics, political science, anthropology and sociology. It argues that most of these interdisciplinary efforts have remained internal to the law, relating conflicts to other legal spheres and issue areas. It summarizes some of the contributions of these projects but also outlines the ways they fall short of the full promise of interdisciplinary work in Conflicts scholarship, and …
Hope In The Law, Annelise Riles