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Full-Text Articles in Law

Anthropology, Human Rights, And Legal Knowledge: Culture In The Iron Cage, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Anthropology, Human Rights, And Legal Knowledge: Culture In The Iron Cage, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

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's 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 …


Market Collaboration: Finance, Culture, And Ethnography After Neoliberalism, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Market Collaboration: Finance, Culture, And Ethnography After Neoliberalism, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

In the wake of the disasters of March 2011, financial regulators and financial-risk management experts in Japan expressed little hope that much could be done nor did they take great interest in defining possible policy interventions. This curious response to regulatory crisis coincided with a new fascination with culturalist explanations of financial markets, on the one hand, and a resort to what I term “data politics”—a politics of intensified data collection—on the other. In this article, I analyze these developments as being exemplary of a new regulatory moment characterized by a loss of faith in both free market regulation and …


Is The Law Hopeful?, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

Ethnography In The Realm Of The Pragmatic: Studying Pragmatism In Law And Politics, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

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Transdisciplinary Conflict Of Laws Foreword: Cavers's Double Legacy, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Transdisciplinary Conflict Of Laws Foreword: Cavers's Double Legacy, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

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Representing In-Between: Law, Anthropology, And The Rhetoric Of Interdisciplinarity, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

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 …


From Multiculturalism To Technique: Feminism, Culture, And The Conflict Of Laws Style, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

From Multiculturalism To Technique: Feminism, Culture, And The Conflict Of Laws Style, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

The German Chancellor, the French President, and the British Prime Minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their states' policies of multiculturalism have failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non- Western countries, revolve around the treatment of women. Yet feminists are no longer even certain how to frame, let alone resolve, the issues raised by veiling, polygamy, and other cultural practices oppressive to women by Western standards. Feminism has become perplexed by the very concept of "culture." This impasse is detrimental both to women's equality and …


Property As Legal Knowledge: Means And Ends, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 …


International Law In Domestic Courts: A Conflict Of Laws Approach, Ralf Michaels, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

International Law In Domestic Courts: A Conflict Of Laws Approach, Ralf Michaels, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

The relationship between international law and domestic law is rarely understood as a conflict of laws. Understanding it in this way opens up a parallel with the field of conflict of laws: the field for which the relationship between legal systems, especially the role of another system's jurisdiction, laws, and judgments vis-à-vis the domestic legal system, are exactly the bread-and-butter issues. We argue for such an approach to international law in domestic courts: an approach that we elaborate as "theory through technique." In our view, conflicts should be seen broadly as the discipline that developed to deal with conflicts between …


The Anti-Network: Private Global Governance, Legal Knowledge, And The Legitimacy Of The State, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

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, …


Wigmore's Treasure Box: Comparative Law In The Era Of Information, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 …


Is New Governance The Ideal Architecture For Global Financial Regulation?, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Is New Governance The Ideal Architecture For Global Financial Regulation?, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

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 …


User Friendly: Informality And Expertise, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

User Friendly: Informality And Expertise, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

No abstract provided.


Introducing Discipline: Anthropology And Human Rights Administrations, Iris Jean-Klein, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Introducing Discipline: Anthropology And Human Rights Administrations, Iris Jean-Klein, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

Anthropologists engage human rights administrations with an implicit promise that our discipline has something unique to offer. The articles in this special issue turn questions about relevance and care so often heard in the context of debates about human rights outside in. They focus not on how anthropology can contribute to human rights activities, but on what anthropological encounters with human rights contribute to the development of our discipline. They ask, how exactly do we render the subject relevant to anthropology? Reflecting on some ways anthropologists in this field have dispensed care for their subjects, the authors highlight two modalities …


Managing Regulatory Arbitrage: An Alternative To Harmonization, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Managing Regulatory Arbitrage: An Alternative To Harmonization, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This policy-oriented article argues for deploying conflict of laws doctrines as a tool of coordination in international financial governance.


Rights Inside Out: The Case Of The Women's Human Rights Campaign, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Rights Inside Out: The Case Of The Women's Human Rights Campaign, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

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 …


Foreword: Accountability For International Crimes And Serious Violations Of Fundamental Human Rights, Madeline Morris, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Foreword: Accountability For International Crimes And Serious Violations Of Fundamental Human Rights, Madeline Morris, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

No abstract provided.


Wigmore's Shadow, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Wigmore's Shadow, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

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.


Infinity Within The Brackets, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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.


Placeholders: Engaging The Hayekian Critique Of Financial Regulation, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

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, …


An Ethnography Of Abstractions?, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

An Ethnography Of Abstractions?, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

No abstract provided.


Reforming Knowledge? A Socio-Legal Critique Of The Legal Education Reforms In Japan, Annelise Riles, Takashi Uchida Dec 2014

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 …


The New Bureaucracies Of Virtue: Introduction, Marie-Andree Jacob, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

The New Bureaucracies Of Virtue: Introduction, Marie-Andree Jacob, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

No abstract provided.


Foreword: Transdisciplinary Conflicts Of Law, Ralf Michaels, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

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 …


Cultural Conflicts, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Cultural Conflicts, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

Riles show how contemporary anthropological insights into the character of cultural difference and cultural fragmentation can reframe conflict-of-laws analysis in productive ways. Taking up the example of the treatment of Native American sovereignty in US courts, she argues that a theory of conflict of laws as a discipline devoted to addressing the problem of cultural conflict is more doctrinally illuminating than the mainstream view of conflict of laws as political conflict. Riles suggests that the general dissatisfaction with conflicts as a field in the United States, and its failure to live up to tits larger promise, may stem in part …


Hope In The Law, Annelise Riles Dec 2014

Hope In The Law, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

No abstract provided.