Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Integrative Research Institute Law & Society (LSI)

The academic disciplines of law and sociocultural anthropology have a long but at times contentious history of drawing on each other in order to study and understand law and human experience in its diverse manifestations. This volume provides an innovative and engaging format by giving established and emerging scholars from diverse jurisdictions the opportunity to discuss and reflect upon what they consider to be a ‘leading work’. The collection offers a unique, multi-perspectival reconsideration of the intellectual history of the field whilst also addressing issues that are at the core of interdisciplinary legal research. Contributions shed light on the changing nature of cross-disciplinary research and collaboration, trace how disciplinary understandings of normativity have cross-fertilised each other, and reflect on choices taken within research on law and anthropology along a continuum of theoretical reflection, critique, engagement, and practical application. The book elaborates on the nature and the boundaries of law and anthropology research, as well as on its likely future development in light of the insights shared by contributors on their chosen leading works. The book will make fascinating reading for researchers and academics in both law and anthropology.

Alice Margaria is assistant professor of law and co-director of the University Research Priority Program ‘Human Reproduction Reloaded’ at the University of Zurich. She is the author of The Construction of Fatherhood: The Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-editor of the special issue Trans Identities and the Law (International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2023, with D. Alaattinoğlu and S. Osella). She is the PI of the project “Who is the Court for? Bringing the Human (back) into Human Rights”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Larissa Vetters is a senior researcher in the Department ‘Law & Anthropology’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Her publications include Prozesse des State Building in Bosnien-Herzegowina (Nomos, 2019), Stategraphy (Berghahn, 2018, with T. Thelen and K. von Benda-Beckmann), and The Making of Procedural Justice: Enacting the State and (Non-)Citizenship (Citizenship Studies, 2022, with S. Andreetta and Z. Yanaşmayan).

The event is part our series LSI Berlin Book Launch and is co-hosted by the Kolloquium Öffentliches Recht und Theorie.