Katayoun Alidadi is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island and Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Her research focuses on comparative law, human rights, employment law, and the intersections of law and religion. She is the author of Religion, Equality and Employment in Europe: The Case for Reasonable Accommodation (Hart, 2017) and co-editor of A Test of Faith: Religious Diversity and Accommodation in the European Workplace (Routledge, 2012), Belief, Law and Politics. What Future for a Secular Europe? (Routledge, 2014), and Public Commissions on Cultural and Religious Diversity: Analysis, Reception and Challenges(Routledge, 2018).
Frédéric Audren is Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Professor of Law at Sciences Po Law School in Paris. His research is devoted to the history of legal knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the history of social sciences. He was a founding member of the Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines and of Clio@Thémis: Revue électronique européenne d'histoire du droit.
Pratiksha Baxi is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research engages with critical perspectives on medical jurisprudence, ethnographies of courts, sociology of violence, gender studies, politics of judicial reform, judicial iconography, courtroom architecture, and feminist legal theory in and beyond India. Her publications include Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is the former Co-Head of the Project Group 'Legal Pluralism' at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. With her late husband Franz von Benda-Beckmann, she conducted decades of anthropological research in the social working of law under conditions of legal pluralism in Indonesia. Among her many books is Political and Legal Transformations of an Indonesian Polity: The Nagari from Colonisation to Decentralisation (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Katia Bianchini is a researcher in the Department of Law & Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She holds a PhD in law from the University of York, UK. From 2015 to 2018, she was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Ethnic and Religious Diversity in Göttingen. Before engaging in research, she practised immigration law in England and the United States for ten years. Her publications include the book Protecting Stateless Person: The Implementation of the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons Across EU States (Brill/Nijhoff, 2018).
Markus Böckenförde is Associate Professor and Chair of the Comparative Constitutional Law Program at Central European University (CEU)'s Department of Legal Studies. Before joining CEU, he was the Founding Executive Director of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University Duisburg-Essen (2012-2018). As head of the advisory team to the Policy Planning Staff at the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (Bonn-Berlin) in 2011-2012, he gained first-hand experience in political decision-making. From 2009 to 2011, he was Program Officer and temporarily Acting Program Manager for the Constitution Building Project at International IDEA, Stockholm, Sweden. Between 2001 and 2008, Böckenförde was the Head of Africa Projects and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg. In 2006-2007, he was seconded by the German Foreign Office to be the legal expert for the Assessment and Evaluation Commission (AEC) in Sudan, which was mandated to support and supervise the implementation of the Sudanese Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
Erica Bornstein is Professor of Anthropology at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A political and legal anthropologist, her research interests include non-governmental organizations (NGOs), voluntary sector regulation, and humanitarianism. She is the author of two monographs: Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi (Stanford, 2012), and The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford 2005), and is co-editor of Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (School for Advanced Research Press, 2011). She is currently writing a book on the regulation of non-profits, philanthropy, and civil society in India.
Paul Burke has had a long career as both a lawyer and an anthropologist. In the legal phase of his career, he appeared as a lawyer for claimants in land claims in the Northern Territory. Since his conversion to anthropology, he has worked as an anthropologist on native title claims. His first book, Law's Anthropology: From Ethnography to Expert Testimony in Native Title (2011), is a Bourdieu-inspired account of the interaction of law and anthropology in native title claims. His most recent work, An Australian Indigenous Diaspora: Warlpiri Matriarchs and the Refashioning of Tradition (2018), is a detailed ethnographic account of the cultural implications of Indigenous migration away from traditional country. He is currently an honorary lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University.
Jennifer Burrell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University at Albany SUNY, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies. She is the author of Maya after War (University of Texas Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Ellen Moodie) of Central America in the New Millennium (Berghahn, 2013). She has recently co-edited (with Ellen Moodie) two special collections, 'Beyond the Migrant Caravan' in Cultural Anthropology (2019) and 'Generations and Political Lives in Central America' in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (2020).
Matthew Canfield is Assistant Professor of Law and Society & Law and Development in the Van Vollenhoven Institute at Leiden Law School. His research examines the law and governance of global food security, specifically focusing on how social movements are formulating new social justice claims and practices of mobilization in response to changing forms of food and agricultural regulation. He is the author of Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance (Stanford, 2022) as well as articles in Public Culture, Law & Society Review, Transnational Legal Theory, and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, among other journals.
Martin Chanock has degrees in history and law from the University of the Witwatersrand. His legal education was in both civil and common law and allowed him to escape the prisons of both traditions. After leaving South Africa in 1965, he took a PhD in history from Cambridge, and went on to teach history at universities in East and West Africa, at the University of Sussex, and the University of Texas in Austin. In 1977 he joined the inter-disciplinary School of Legal Studies (later the School of Law) at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and accidentally stayed forever. He has published widely on legal history in colonial and postcolonial situations, including two books: Law, Custom and Social Order (Cambridge 1985) and The Making of South African Legal Culture (Cambridge 2001). He is currently working on a book on constitutional illusions in Africa. Another major area of engagement has been in questions of how and what to teach about law in universities.
Lynette J. Chua is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore. She is a law-and-society scholar with research interests in legal mobilization, legal consciousness, rights, and social movements. She is the author of The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford University Press, 2019) and Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (Temple University Press, 2014).
Priscilla Claeys is Associate Professor in Food Sovereignty, Human Rights and Resilience at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University (UK). She received her PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Louvain (UCL) in 2013. From 2008 to 2014, she worked as a Special Advisor to Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. Her research areas include the right to food and food sovereignty, agrarian movements, global food governance, legal mobilization and the creation of new human rights. She has published Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement: Reclaiming Control (Routledge 2015) and co-edited two books. Her research has notably featured in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Sociology, and Globalizations.
Kamari Maxine Clarkeis Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Socio-legal Studies at The University of Toronto. Trained in anthropology and law, she has spent her career exploring theoretical questions of culture and power, detailing the relationship between new transnational formations and contemporary problems. Her acclaimed bookFictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism(Cambridge University Press, 2009) analyses how human rights conceptions are negotiated in global legal plural contexts, especially regarding international criminal law. Her most recent book,Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback(Duke University Press, 2019),is concerned with challenges over the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court in Africa.
Philipp Dann is Professor and Chair of Public and Comparative Law at Humboldt University Berlin. His research focuses on the encounter of the Global South and North in all registers of public law. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal World Comparative Law. His recent publications include 'The Battle for International Law in the Decolonization Era' (OUP 2019, with Jochen von Bernstorff), 'The Global South and Comparative Constitutional Law' (OUP 2020, with Michael Riegner and Maxim Bönnemann) and 'Democratic Constitutionalism in India and the EU' (Edward Elgar 2021, with Arun Thiruvengadam).
Eve Darian-Smith is Professor and Chair of Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Trained as a lawyer, historian, and anthropologist, she is interested in issues of postcolonialism, legal pluralism, global governance, human rights, authoritarianism, and socio-legal theory. She is a prize-winning author and has published widely, including eleven books and edited volumes and numerous articles in the fields of anthropology, global studies, history, and law & society. Darian-Smith serves on seven editorial boards and is an invited board member of Contemporary Social Science: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK).
Sara L. M. Davis is Senior Researcher leading the Digital Health and Rights Project at the Global Health Centre, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. She is the author of The Uncounted: Politics of Data in Global Health (Cambridge University Press 2020) and Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China's Southwest Borders (Columbia University Press 2005). Davis was founding executive director of Asia Catalyst, senior human rights advisor at the Global Fund, and earned her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked as a consultant with UNAIDS, UNDP, and international civil society advocacy networks. Her current research focuses on digital technologies, artificial intelligence, health, and human rights.
Brian Donahoe is Senior Scientific Editor of the Law & Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. He holds an MA in journalism and a PhD in anthropology, both from Indiana University. He conducted long-term fieldwork among the hunting and reindeer-herding communities of the Saian Mountain region in southern Siberia (Tozhu, Tofa, Soiot, and Dukha), and has published on the politics of indigeneity in Russia. He is co-editor of two volumes, Law against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law's Transformations (Cambridge, 2012, with Julia Eckert, Zerrin Özlem Biner, and Christian Strümpell) and Reconstructing the House of Culture: Community, Self and the Makings of Culture in Russia and Beyond (Berghahn, 2011, with Joachim Otto Habeck).
Baudouin Dupret studied law, Islamic sciences, and political sciences. He is Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is also guest lecturer at the University of Louvain (Belgium) and at the University of Leiden (Netherlands). He has published extensively in the fields of sociology and anthropology on law, legislation, and media, especially in the Middle East. He has (co)edited numerous volumes, the most recent being Law at Work: Studies in Legal Ethnomethods (with M. Lynch and T. Berard, Oxford, 2015) and Legal Rules in Practice: In the Midst of Law's Life (with J. Colemans and M. Travers, Routledge, 2020), and single-authored several books, including Practices of Truth: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Arab Settings (Benjamins, 2011), Adjudication in Action: An Ethnomethodology of Law, Morality and Justice (Ashgate, 2011), What Is the Sharia? (Hurst, 2017), and Positive Law from the Muslim World: Jurisprudence, History, Practices (Cambridge, 2021).
Thomas Duve is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, and Professor of Comparative Legal History at Goethe University (both in Frankfurt). He works principally on the legal history of the imperial spaces of the Iberian monarchies in the early modern period, especially the history of early modern canon law and moral theology, as well as the history of legal practices.
Julia Eckert is Professor of Political Anthropology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She specializes in legal anthropology, the anthropology of the modern state, conflict theory, and social movements. Her current research interests are the transnationalization of legal norms, the anthropology of crime and punishment, changing notions of responsibility and liability, security, and citizenship. She has conducted research on everyday conflicts over norms of justice, citizenship, and authority with a project on the police in Mumbai, India. Her publications include Law against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law's Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2012) as well as a book on a Hindu nationalist movement in India entitled The Charisma of Direct Action (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and holds a Direction of Studies in Political and Moral Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His interest in humanitarianism and his involvement in the organization Médecins Sans Frontières gave birth to a scientific programme on the new forms of global interventionism. Drawing on case materials from France, South Africa, Venezuela, and Palestine, his book Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (University of California Press, 2011) explores the meaning of humanitarianism in the contexts of immigration and asylum, disease and poverty, disaster and war.
Balázs Fekete is Associate Professor at the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Law, Department of Law and Society, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies, both in Budapest. His main areas of research include rights consciousness, legal alienation, and comparative legal studies methodology. His most recent book is Paradigms in Modern Comparative Law. A History (Hart Publishing, 2021).
Marie-Claire Foblets is Director of the Law and Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Honorary Professor of Law & Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, both in Halle/Saale, Germany. Trained in law and anthropology, she taught law as well as social and cultural anthropology at the universities of Antwerp and Brussels and the Catholic University of Leuven, where she headed the Institute for Migration Law and Legal Anthropology, before joining the Max Planck Institute. She has also been a member of various networks of researchers focusing on the study of the application of Islamic law in Europe and on law and migration in Europe, paying particular attention to family law. Her numerous publications include Family, Religion and Law: Cultural Encounters in Europe (Ashgate, 2014).
Günter Frankenberg is Professor of Public Law, Comparative Law, and Jurisprudence (em.) at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. His main areas of research include authoritarian regimes, comparative constitutionalism, transfer of laws and constitutions, security regimes and infection protection law. He is the author of Authoritarianism - Constitutional Perspectives (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020); Comparative Constitutional Studies - Between Magic and Deceit (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018); Comparative Law as Critique (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016); and Political Technology and the Erosion of the Rule of Law (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014).
Berihun Gebeye is a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. He was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Göttingen, and has held visiting fellowships at Columbia Law School, the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, and at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. He has taught comparative constitutional law and politics at the Central European University, University of Yangon, and the University of Göttingen. He holds degrees in law, human rights, and comparative constitutional law, and has published extensively in these fields, with a particular focus on Africa. He is the author of A Theory of African Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Mark Goodale holds a chair at the University of Lausanne, where he is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology and former Director of the Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology (LACS). The founding Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights, he is the author, editor, or coeditor of fifteen volumes, including Letters to the Contrary: A Curated History of the UNESCO Human Rights Survey (ed., Stanford University Press, 2018), Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (NYU Press, 2017), Human Rights at the Crossroads (ed., Oxford University Press, 2013), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (ed., Blackwell, 2010), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2009), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (coed. with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge University Press, 2007). His most recent books are Reinventing Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2022) and A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2019).
Michele Graziadei is Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Torino and Collegio Carlo Alberto Fellow, Past President, European Law Faculties Association. He is the author of over a hundred publications on comparative law, civil law, legal history, and legal theory. His recent publications include Comparative Property Law: Global Perspectives (edited with L. Smith; Edward Elgar, 2018) and Personal Autonomy in Plural Societies (edited with M-C- Foblets and A.D. Renteln, Routledge 2018).
Carol Greenhouse is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Princeton University. She earned her AB and PhD degrees from Harvard University. Her primary research interests lie in the ethnography of law, particularly in relation to federal power in the United States. Her books include Transnational Law: Cases and Problems in an Interconnected World (with A. C. Aman), The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States and, as editor, Ethnographies of Neoliberalism. She is past president of the American Ethnological Society, the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and the Law & Society Association, and past editor of American Ethnologist. Her work on the ethnography of law has been recognized by the Law & Society Association and the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and Humanities. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Anne Griffiths is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology of Law at Edinburgh University. Her research focuses on anthropology of law, comparative and family law, African law, gender, culture, and rights. Over the years she has held a number of research grants and affiliations, including a research fellowship on Framing the Global at Indiana University and a senior research fellowship at the International Research Centre on Work and the Human Lifecycle in Global History, Humboldt University, Berlin. She has worked with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany and has had visiting appointments at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain, the University of Texas-Austin School of Law, the Southern and Eastern African Regional Centre for Women's Law (SEARCWL) at the University of Zimbabwe, and the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.
Laetitia Guerlain is Professor of Legal History at the University of Bordeaux and a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France. She works on the history of legal thought and legal knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a strong focus on the relationship between legal science and other human and social sciences, such as sociology and anthropology.
Armando Guevara Gil is a Peruvian legal anthropologist and historian. He holds a law degree (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú), a master's degree in cultural anthropology (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and a doctorate in law (University of Amsterdam). He specializes and publishes in the fields of legal pluralism, colonial and republican law in the Andes, water law, and Indigenous rights. He was a visiting professor at the University of Torino (2019) and a guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (Frankfurt, 2019-2020). He is currently Director of Research at the Universidad para el Desarrollo Andino (UDEA, Huancavelica, Perú), a professor of law at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC, Lima), an affiliated researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt), and an associate researcher at the Instituto del Perú (USMP, Lima).
Dirk Hanschel is Professor of German, European and International Public Law at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. His research focuses on, among other topics, issues at the junction of environmental law and human rights from interdisciplinary perspectives, as well as comparative constitutional law. As a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, he currently leads a research project titled Environmental Rights in Cultural Context (ERCC). By conducting selected case studies, the ERCC project aims to examine the extent to which environmental rights as inscribed in constitutions provide valid norms in the local context in the face of environmental threats resulting from climate change, mining activities, large-scale infrastructure projects, etc. Another of his current research projects, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), focuses on the Indian National Green Tribunal's implementation of UN Sustainable Development Goal #6 (SDG 6) on clean water and sanitation.
Aytalina Ivanova is University Researcher at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland (Finland) and Docent in Law at Northeastern Federal University, Yakutsk, Russia. She earned a Russian PhD (kandidat nauk) in history with a thesis on Sakha statehood in the early twentieth century. Unusual for a Russian legal scholar, she describes herself as a fieldwork-based legal anthropologist with a focus on the lived experience of the law in the Russian North. She has worked and published on Indigenous peoples and extractive industries in the Russian North and on Russian Indigenous and Arctic legislation. She has worked before at the Arctic University of Norway (Tromso) and the Centre for Northeast Asian Studies at Tohoku University (Japan).
Andrzej Jakubowski is affiliated with the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Property Law at the University of Opole, and currently serves as a NAWA Visiting Bekker Fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law. He also acts as Chair of the Committee on Participation in Global Cultural Heritage Governance of the International Law Association. He holds a PhD in international law from the European University Institute in Florence and an MA in art history from the University of Warsaw. His publications include the monograph State Succession in Cultural Property (Oxford University Press, 2015) and the edited collection Cultural Rights as Collective Rights: An International Law Perspective (Brill, 2016). Jakubowski is currently co-editing, with Ana Filipa Vrdoljak and Alessandro Chechi, a commentary on the 1970 UNESCO and 1995 UNIDROIT conventions (under contract with Oxford University Press).
Rita Kesselring is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on inequality, solidarity, corporate practices, urban development, and memory in South Africa and Zambia. She is the author of Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Dodom Kim is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research explores how legal and technological infrastructures shape the shifting values of human labour and bodies at the intersection of migration and citizenship. Her current project focuses on documentation practices that mediate people's narratives of their social and legal mobility as state citizens in southern China. The provisional title of her forthcoming dissertation is Documenting Uncertainties: Legal Identity, Bureaucratic Promises, and Mobility in Southern China.
Juliette Koning is Professor of Business in Society at the School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. She holds a PhD in social anthropology(University of Amsterdam). Recent research focuses on the privatization and organization of security. She recently co-edited a special issue for Organization Studies(2020 with Marianna Fotaki and Yochanan Altman) on Spirituality, Symbolism and Storytelling in Twentyfirst-Century Organizations. Her latest edited volume is New Religiosities, Modern Capitalism and Moral Complexities in Southeast Asia (Palgrave, with Gweneal Njoto-Feillard). Juliette is also Associate Editor of Human Relations.
Felix-Anselm van Lier is a public law scholar focusing on constitution-making processes and, more recently, on public procurement. He is a Research and Policy Associate at the Government Outcomes Lab at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government, where he investigates how new approaches in social policy and outcomes-based commissioning can help to better organize the provision of public services. He was previously a Research Fellow in the Law & Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where he researched the role of technology in constitution making. Lier studied law in Germany and Italy before completing an MSc in Law and Anthropology at LSE and a DPhil in Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. Among other professional positions, he has worked as a consultant for the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, Democracy Reporting International, the Berghof Foundation, and Lawyers for Justice in Libya.
Sally Engle Merry (1944-2020) was Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, Co-Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law, and past President of the American Ethnological Society. Her many research topics over her career included conflict resolution and legal consciousness, law and colonialism, human rights and gender violence, and global technologies of quantification. Her later published volumes include Colonizing Hawai'i (Princeton University Press, 2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2006), The Practice of Human Rights (coed. with Mark Goodale, Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwell, 2009). Her final book, The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (University of Chicago Press, 2016) examines indicators as a technology of knowledge used for human rights monitoring and global governance. She also coedited two books on quantification, The Quiet Power of Indicators, with Kevin Davis and Benedict Kingsbury (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and A World of Indicators, with Richard Rottenburg, Song-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai'i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to sociolegal scholarship in 2007, the J.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010, and the AAA Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology in 2019.
Elizabeth Mertz is a Senior Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, as well as John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emerit at the University of Wisconsin Law School. She was Lichtstern Distinguished Research Scholar in Residence 2020-21 at the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago; Katherine and Martin Crane Fellow at Princeton University's Program in Law and Public Affairs; Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, School of Social Science; and Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University. She has served as Editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review as well as of Law & Social Inquiry. Her research focuses on the language of law, from the semiotics of legal training to the difficulties of cross-disciplinary translation as confronted by the New Legal Realist movement.
Ralf Michaels is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany, Chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University in London, and Professor of Law at Hamburg University. Until 2019 he was the Arthur Larson Professor at Duke University School of Law. He is a widely published scholar of private international law, comparative law, and legal theory. His current research focuses on decolonial comparative law, regulatory conflicts, and theoretical foundations of private international law. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, the American Law Institute, and the Comparative Law Associations of the United States, Germany, and France.
Sindiso Mnisi Weeksis Associate Professor of Law and Society in the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Public Law at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She was previously a senior researcherin the Rural Women's Action Research Programme at UCT, combining research, advocacy, and policy work on women, property, governance, and participation under customary law and the South African Constitution. Mnisi Weeks received her DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies as a Rhodes Scholar, and previously clerked for Dikgang Moseneke, then Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. She is the author ofAccess to Justice and Human Security: Cultural Contradictions in Rural South Africa(Routledge,2018) andco-author ofAfrican Customary Law in South Africa: Post-Apartheid and Living Law Perspectives(OUPSA, 2015).
Dominik M. Müller is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), where he is also Speaker of the Elite Graduate Program 'Standards of Decision-Making Across Cultures'. He is also heading the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group 'The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia'. He is a cooperation partner with the Law & Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where he worked from 2016 until 2019 prior to his appointment at FAU.
Faris Nasrallah is a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales. He earned his LLB from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and his LLM from the University of Cambridge. He is currently leading a research project on the relationship between theory and practice in international arbitration at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and in 2020 established the International Arbitration Working Group as part of the Max Planck Law Network. Nasrallah is specialized in international arbitration, having worked for leading US and international law firms in London and Dubai. He has represented clients in complex and high-value international arbitration proceedings and has extensive advocacy experience. With experience as counsel, expert, and arbitrator, his international arbitration practice focuses on commercial, construction, energy, and telecommunications disputes, with specialist knowledge of Middle Eastern laws.
Ronald Niezen is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Member of the Faculty of Law at McGill University. He has conducted research on an Islamic reform movement in West Africa, justice campaigns in Indigenous communities in Canada, and the international movement of Indigenous peoples in the United Nations. His books include The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Difference (University of California Press 2003), Truth and Indignation: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press 2017), a co-edited volume (with Maria Sapignoli) Palaces of Hope: The Anthropology of Global Organizations (Cambridge University Press 2017), and #HumanRights: The Technologies and Politics of Justice Claims in Practice (Stanford University Press 2020).
Math Noortmann is Professor of Transnational Law and Non-State Actors at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR), Coventry University (UK). He has taught and researched at universities in the Netherlands, Singapore, Germany, and the UK. He holds a PhD in International Law and an MSc in Political Science, combining the two disciplines in his transdisciplinary pursuit of knowledge and understanding of law and politics. He queries the links between security and order on the one hand, and justice and human dignity on the other. More specifically, he investigates the roles of non-state actors in transnational security governance: in particular the private security sector, non-governmental organisations and intergovernmental organizations. He received research funding from ESRC/AHRC (PaCCS), Newton (Institutional Links), and ESRC (CREST).
Karine Peschard is Research Associate at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva). Trained as an anthropologist, her research interests centre on intellectual property rights, agrobiodiversity, legal activism, peasant rights, and seed sovereignty, with a focus on Brazil and India. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS), the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and the Annual Review of Anthropology, as well as in edited books. She is the co-editor of a Special Forum on Seed Activism (JPS, 2020), and the author of an ethnography of court challenges to intellectual property rights on biotech crops in Brazil and India (MIT Press, forthcoming 2022).
Fernanda Pirie is Professor of the Anthropology of Law at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford.An anthropologist specializing in Tibetan societies, she has used her research into legal practices and legal codes to develop the anthropology of law. The Anthropology of Law (OUP, 2013) builds on themes and debates developed in the Legalism research group, which she convened with colleagues in anthropology and history (Legalism, 4 vols, OUP). As well as studying contemporary Tibetan societies, Pirie has written on the legal history of medieval Tibet (see www.tibetanlaw.org). Her latest book is a global history of law, The Rule of Laws: A 4,000-year Quest to Order the world(Profile Books, Basic Books, 2021).
Alison Dundes Renteln is Professor of Political Science, Anthropology, Public Policy, and Law at the University of Southern California. She has a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (Berkeley) and a JD (USC). A public law scholar, she studies international law, human rights, comparative legal systems, constitutional law, and legal and political theory. An expert on cultural rights, she served on the State Bar Commission on Access to Justice and the California Judicial Council Access and Fairness Advisory Committee. She also served as a member of the California Attorney General's Commission on Hate Crimes and was appointed in 2020 to the California State Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. She has taught judges and attorneys at meetings of the American Bar Association and the National Association of Woman Judges. She serves on the Board of Trustees for the Law and Society Association and the editorial board of Law and Social Inquiry. Her publications include The Cultural Defense (Oxford University Press, 2004), Multicultural Jurisprudence (Hart, 2009), Cultural Law (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Images and Human Rights (Cambridge Scholars, 2017), Global Bioethics and Human Rights (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), and many articles.
Annelise Riles is Executive Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Associate Provost for Global Affairs, and Professor of Law and Anthropology at Northwestern University. Based on legal and anthropological research in China, Japan, and the Pacific, her work focuses on the transnational dimensions of law, markets, and culture across the fields of private law, conflict of laws, financial regulation, and comparative legal studies. Her books include The Network Inside Out (University of Michigan Press, 2000), Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Financial Citizenship: Experts, Publics, and the Politics of Central Banking (Cornell University Press, 2018). Annelise Riles was awarded the Certificate of Merit of the American Society of International Law, 2000-2001.
Maria Sapignoli is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropologyin the Department of Philosophy Piero Martinetti (University of Milan). She is a cooperation partner of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where she is also a member of the scientific committee accompanying the research cluster she contributed to setting up, titled 'The Anthropology of AI in Policing and Justice'. Sapignoli has spent the past ten years conducting ethnographic fieldwork in southern Africa as well as in several international organizations, including the United Nations, on topics of institutional reform, Indigenous and minority rights, social movements and advocacy and, ultimately, justice. Most recently she has started a new project which engages, critically and collaboratively, with the legal and social challenges and opportunities presented by the use of artificial intelligence technologies and big data in society and in environmental governance. She is the author of Hunting Justice: Displacement, Law, and Activism in the Kalahari (Cambridge University Press 2018), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is also co-editor (with Ronald Niezen) of Palaces of Hope: The Anthropology of Global Organizations (Cambridge University Press 2017).
Katrin Seidel is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Law & Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, a former fellow at Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research (2015/16), and former Academic Coordinator of the Joint Network Rule of Law Support at Free University Berlin, in collaboration with the German Federal Foreign Office (2017). Based on her interdisciplinary background (law and African/Asian studies), her research is situated at the intersection of legal pluralism, heterogeneous statehood, and governance. Seidel's studies are concerned with interdependent relationships between plural normative and judicial orders at different levels of regulation, and with the intertwining of the respective social actors involved. Her current research is a comparative analysis of post-conflict constitution making in South Sudan and Somaliland.
Rachel Sieder holds a PhD in Politics from the University of London. She is Senior Research Professor at the Center for Research and Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City, where she teaches legal and political anthropology. She is also an associate senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. She has worked for the last three decades on Central America, and her research interests include human rights, Indigenous rights, social movements, Indigenous law, legal anthropology, the state, and violence. Her most recent books include The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (with Karina Ansolabehere and Tatiana Alfonso Sierra, Routledge, 2019), Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America (Rutgers University Press, 2017); and Justicias Indígenas y Estado: Violencias Contemporáneas (with María Teresa Sierra and Rosalva Aída Hernández, FLACSO/CIESAS, 2013).
Florian Stammler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. He coordinates the EU's northernmost anthropology research team and has led multiple Finnish and international Arctic research projects. Stammler has lived for years in the Russian Arctic, conducting fieldwork with reindeer herders, government officials, and representatives of extractive industries. He has published on Indigenous peoples and industrial development, the anthropology of extractivism, northern nomadic pastoralism, human-animal relations, oral history, and the anthropology of well-being. His publications include Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market (2005) and the edited volumes People and Reindeer on the Move (2006, with Hugh Beach), Good to Eat - Good to Live With (2010, with Hiroki Takakura), the Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic (2020, with T. Koivurova, E. Broderstad, D. Cambou, and D. Dorough), and Young People, Wellbeing and Placemaking in the Arctic (2021, with Reetta Toivanen).
Elizabeth Steyn is Cassels Brock Fellow and Assistant Professor in Mining and Finance Law at Western University, Canada. She also is a faculty member of the Western Institute for Earth and Space Exploration. At Western Law, she heads the Mining, Finance and Sustainability Program. She is a member of the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation (RMMLF), the Natural Resources Law Teachers Institute (NRTLI), the Canadian Institute of Mining (CIM), and the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC). At present she is working on three main projects: the potential domestic liability of transnational extractive companies for abuses committed abroad by their foreign subsidiaries; regulatory gaps relating to deep-sea mining; and the development of an International Environmental Law (IEL) framework for space mining. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) also recently appointed Steyn as Principal Investigator for the development of Guiding Principles for a Responsible and Sustainable Mining and Metals Sector to Achieve the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals in the Context of the Green Recovery.
Brian Thom is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Victoria, where in 2010 he founded the Ethnographic Mapping Lab (http://ethnographicmapping.uvic.ca). He has worked for more than twenty-five years with Coast Salish communities in British Columbia on the recognition of Indigenous land rights and jurisdictions, attending to the cultural and political priorities of their engagements with the ongoing legacies of colonialism. From 1994-1997 and 2000-2010 he worked as researcher, senior advisor, and negotiator for several Coast Salish First Nations (Canada) engaged in treaty, land claims, and self-government negotiations, and currently collaborates with the Centre for Indigenous Conservation and Development Alternatives (http://cicada.world). His research is focused on issues of Indigenous territoriality, knowledge, and governance; revealing contemporary practices of Indigenous law; and clarifying the ontological imperatives behind Indigenous political strategies. Thom's publications 'The Paradox of Boundaries in Coast Salish Territories' (Cultural Geographies 2009) and 'Reframing Indigenous Territories' (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 2014) critically attend to state-reinforced discourses of overlapping claims; his ethnography 'Entanglements in Coast Salish Ancestral Territories' (in Entangled Territorialities [Dussart and Poirier, eds.], UTP Press 2017) examines political ontology in reconciling land rights.
Bertram Turner holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Munich and is Senior Researcher in the Department of Law & Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He has conducted extended field research in the Middle East and North Africa, Germany, and Canada, and has held university teaching positions in Munich, Leipzig, and Halle. He has published widely on the anthropology of law, science and technology, religion, conflict, development, and resource extraction. Among his more recent publications are a chapter on the anthropology of property in Comparative Property Law: Global Perspectives, edited by Michele Graziadei and Lionel Smith (Edward Elgar, 2017) and a chapter, co-authored with Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, on the anthropological roots of global legal pluralism in the Oxford Handbook on Global Legal Pluralism, edited by Paul Schiff Berman (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Melanie G. Wiber is an economic and legal anthropologist and Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology, University of New Brunswick. She has published several books and edited volumes on property rights (including Politics, Property and Law in the Philippine Uplands, WLU Press, 1994) as well as a volume on gender in human evolution imagery. Her work includes analysis of the property aspects of irrigation rights, dairy quota and supply management, and of the Canadian fisheries. For the past twenty years, Wiber has conducted participatory, action-based research in the fisheries of the Canadian Maritime provinces. Most recently, this research has focused on local ecological knowledge, ecological threats such as marine debris and oil spills, and the impact of climate change on fishing communities.
Richard A. Wilson is Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Anthropology and Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Intellectual Life at the University of Connecticut School of Law. As author or editor of eleven books, he researches and writes about international human rights, social media and online hate speech, and post-conflict justice institutions such as truth and reconciliation commissions and international criminal tribunals.He edited Human Rights, Culture and Context (1997), the first edited book on the anthropology human rights, and authored an influential ethnographic study of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (2001). Hismost recent book is Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting International Speech Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is a member of the Hate Crimes Advisory Council of the state of Connecticut and served as chair of the State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2009-14).
