Week 1
January 18 - Introduction
Why study legal anthropology?
No reading due


Week 2
January 25 - Introductions and Classics
Lawrence Rosen. 2008. Law as Culture: An invitation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. PDF includes required chapters: Introduction and Chapter 2 “Creating Facts.” Pages 1-13, 68-130.

Sally Falk Moore. 2004. “Certainties Undone: Fifty turbulent years of Legal Anthropology, 1959-1999.” In Law and Anthropology: A Reader. Sally Falk Moore, ed. London: Blackwell. Pages: 346-367.

“The Early Classics of Legal Anthropology” selections from Malinowski, Schapera, Gluckman, Bohannan, and Pospisil. In Law and Anthropology: A Reader. Sally Falk Moore, ed. London: Blackwell. Pages: 65-100.


Week 3
February 1 - American Justice
Sally Engle Merry. 1990. Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal consciousness among working-class Americans. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.

+ Film: “Witchcraft among the Azande.” 1981. 52 minutes. Andre Singer, director.
To watch the film, go to our Collab site and click on the Kaltura tab. Then click on the smaller tab that says “Site Library.” The film should be streaming from there.

Week 4
February 8 - Kenyan Justice
Susan Hirsch. 1998. Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the discourses of disputing in an African Islamic court. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.


Week 5
February 15 - Everyday America
Michelle Alexander. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: New Press.

See also, NYT on legal bias against Blacks in bankruptcy processes.


Week 6
February 22 - Everyday Japan
Mark West. 2005. Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.

Mark West. 2011. “Judging” in his Lovesick Japan: Sex Marriage Romance Law. Ithaca: Cornell UP.


Week 7
February 29 - Global and Local Rights
Sally Engle Merry. 2006. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating international law into local justice. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.


Week 8
March 14 - Building social categories through law
Nicholas Dirks. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton: Princeton UP.

+ Discussion of Merry’s Human Rights and Gender Violence.

Week 9
March 21 - Ownership
Michael Brown. 2004. Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge: Harvard UP.

Barbara Yngvesson and Susan Coutin. 2008. “Schrödinger's Cat and the Ethnography of Law.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 31(1):61-78.


Week 10
March 28 - Bureaucracy
Michael Herzfeld. 1993. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the symbolic roots of Western bureaucracy. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.


Week 11
April 4 - Law and Capital
Annelise Riles. 2011. Collateral Knowledge: Legal reasoning in the global financial markets. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.


Week 12
April 11 - International (In)Justice
Kamari Clarke. 2009. Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.


Week 13
April 18 - Illegality
Ugo Mattei and Laura Nader. 2008. Plunder: When the rule of law is illegal. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.


Week 14
April 25 - Presentations
Student presentations, schedule TBA


Week 15
Final thoughts and reflections
Required group conversation will be scheduled