JJUA55039U Anthropology of Law

The course intends to provide a basis for understanding and analyzing the role of law in society from the perspective of anthropological theory and method. Over the past few decades, anthropological theory has been paying increasing attention to law, while lawyers and policy makers have become more attentive to the cultural contexts of legal rules. International laws, human rights issues and the intensification of migration and thus presence of large ethnic minority groups within nation states are but some of the developments that have contributed to this increasingly overlapping interest between anthropology and law. While the traditional project of legal anthropologists has been the study of non-Western settings, often pointing to the logic and moral sense of their seemingly “exotic” practices, research is now additionally considering the socio-legal aspects of the modern state, and in this process often deconstructing taken-for-granted assumptions about the objectivity and rationality of Western law. Against this background, the course aims to develop the capacity of students to formulate critical analyses of legal practices, and to understand the social and cultural context of legal institutions in both Western and non-Western societies. The course will be thematically centred on analysing law as conflict, law as process, law and rights, and finally, law as power. This will be done both at a theoretical and a methodological level. Fieldwork methods are at the core of anthropological inquiry into legal matters, asking specific questions in specific settings about the distribution of power, control and justice in relation to law – how are legal norms established, and how are they enforced, justified, or even evaded?

The course will consist of three major components:
• An introduction to the field of legal anthropology. The aim is to enhance the students’ assessment of the development of theoretical discussions and focal points within the field.
• A thorough analysis of present issues at the core of anthropology of law with an emphasis on ethnicity, gender, human rights, and the relation between law, language and power. Students will identify and critically discuss these topics, especially focusing on competing claims and contested norms and values within larger, formal law systems.
• A study of methodological aspects within legal anthropology. Empirical data will be analyzed and discussed in order to enhance students’ ability to use and evaluate this type of data in their social analysis of legal issues. During this component, students will be called for to work on an empirical project, preferably in groups. This can be done either by collecting qualitative data themselves, by analysing empirical material from the curriculum, or in the form of interviews and field notes from the teacher’s own fieldwork. This part will end with a short report and an oral presentation by the students in class. The written exam (essay) can take its point of departure in this project.