| Popis: |
This chapter challenges anthropologists’ long-standing antipathy to the study of legal technique. It highlights Max Weber and Karl Llewellyn’s early interest in legal experts and legal knowledge as objects of sociological study, but suggests that the impetus to produce an external critique of law or context for law has hindered subsequent generations of anthropologists and sociolegal scholars from engaging legal technique as an object of ethnographic inquiry. In response, this chapter argues for greater ethnographic attention to the aspect of legal knowledge that most captivates lawyers: the means. The chapter highlights a growing body of sociolegal scholarship that engages with legal technique by drawing variously on systems theory and science and technology studies (STS) to illuminate the recursivity of legal expertise, the materiality of legal knowledge, and the agency of legal technique. Ultimately, this chapter argues that anthropologists’ long-standing attention to the constraints of form inherent in exchange can serve as a productive starting point both for anthropological theory and methods to elucidate the workings of legal knowledge, and for ethnography of legal technique to serve as a source of theoretical innovation. |
