Coordinators: Jessica Greenberg (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), Grigory Gorbun (University of Chicago/University of Mississippi), Rob Gelles (University of Chicago), Justin B. Richland (University of California Irvine/American Bar Foundation)
Description of the meeting
The rule of law faces mounting challenges in what may be the “twilight” of late liberalism. Authoritarian and populist leaders have captured constitutional and judicial orders, raising the stakes for rule of law norms already unsettled by rising lawfare. While “crisis” narratives ought to inspire careful skepticism, both legal institutionalists and their critics have persistently struggled to make sense of law’s destabilization—at the heart of which lies a blurring of its anchoring distinction between law and politics. Discerning how law matters, how it materializes full of consequential meanings in everyday legal practice, requires more than discerning the political dimensions of law or the legal dimensions of politics.
This workshop aims to develop an analytic approach to meet law’s current critical moment. It draws together scholars trained across three continents to interrogate law as an object of inquiry and as a material and social phenomenon that inheres in but is not exhausted by its normative forms. We take inspiration from the pivotal Wenner-Gren Symposia in legal anthropology held in 1964 and 1966, renewing Laura Nader’s call to ask anew how law matters. Together, we consider mattering in two senses of the word: law’s salience and law’s materiality. We ask how lawyers, judges, activists, legal educators, diplomats, scientists, and community organizations see legal frameworks and forms as a means of responding to the limits of human agency in an impossibly complex and often violent world. Here law matters precisely because it both shapes and is an infrastructure for communication, coordination, and action as people inhabit and enact its normative forms and distinctions. In so doing, this workshop can sharpen the conceptual tools of anthropology of law and sociolegal studies as it comes to grips with law’s simultaneous and irreducibly ideational and material characteristics.
