Introduction: Mapping the Field of Law and Anthropology

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).

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 either author, editor, or co-editor of fifteen volumes, including (co-ed. with Sally Engle Merry) The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2009), (ed.) Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell, 2010), (ed.) Human Rights at the Crossroads (Oxford University Press, 2013), Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (NYU Press, 2017), and (ed.) Letters to the Contrary: A Curated History of the UNESCO Human Rights Survey (Stanford University Press, 2018). His most recent books are A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2019) and Reinventing Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2022).

Maria Sapignoli is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology in 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, entitled ‘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).

Olaf Zenker is Professor of Social Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Focusing on Southern Africa, Northern Ireland, and Germany, his research has dealt with politico-legal issues such as conflict and identity formations, plural normative orders, statehood, bureaucracy, the rule of law, modernity, inequality, and justice, as well as sociolinguistics and anthropological epistemologies. His recent publications include (co-edited with Gerhard Anders) Transition and Justice: Negotiating the Terms of New Beginnings in Africa (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); (co-edited with Steffen Jensen) South African Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid’s Loose Ends in the Postcolonial Era (Routledge, 2017); and (co-edited with Markus Hoehne) The State and the Paradox of Customary Law in Africa (Routledge, 2018).