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Comparative Law is experiencing something of a renaissance,as legal
scholars and practitioners traditionally outside the discipline
find it newly relevant in projects such as constitution and code
drafting, the harmonization of laws, court decisions, or as a tool
for understanding the globalization of legal institutions. On the
other hand, comparativists within the discipline find themselves
asking questions about the identity of comparative law, what it is
that makes comparative law unique as a discipline, what is the way
forward. This book, designed with courses in comparative law as
well as scholarly projects in mind, brings a new generation of
comparativists together to reflect on the character of their
discipline. It aims to incite curiosity and debate about
contemporary issues within comparative law by bringing the
discipline into conversation with debates in anthropology, literary
and cultural studies, and critical theory. The book addresses
questions such as what is the disciplinary identity of comparative
law; how should we understand its relationship to colonialism,
modernism, the Cold War, and other wider events that have shaped
its history; what is its relationship to other projects of
comparison in the arts, social sciences and humanities; and how has
comparative law contributed at different times and in different
parts of the world to projects of legal reform. Each of the essays
frames its intervention around a close reading of the life and work
of one formative character in the history of the discipline. Taken
as a whole, the book offers a fresh and sophisticated picture of
the discipline and its future. Contents: Montesquieu: the specter
of despotism and the origins of comparative law (Robert Launay);
Max Weber and the uncertainties of categorical comparative law
(Ahmed White); Rethinking Hermann Kantorowicz: Free law, American
legal realism and the legacy of anti-formalism (Vivian Grosswald
Curran); Encountering amateurism: John Henry Wigmore and the uses
of American formalism (Annelise Riles); Nobushige Hozumi: A
skillful transplanter of western legal thought into Japanese soil
(Hitoshi Aoki); Sanhuri, comparative law and Islamic legal reform,
or why cultural authenticity is impossible (Amr Shalakany);
Sculpting the agenda of comparative law: Ernst Rabel and the facade
of language (David J. Gerber); Rene David: At the head of the
family (Jorge L. Esquirol); Postmodern-Structural Comparative
Jurisprudence? The aggregate impact of R. B. Schlesinger and R.
Sacco to the understanding of the legal order (Ugo Mattei).
Examines the outsized influence of jurors on prosecutorial
discretion Thanks to television and popular media, the jury is
deeply embedded in the American public's imagination of the legal
system. For the country's federal prosecutors, however, jurors have
become an increasingly rare sight. Today, in fact, less than 2% of
their cases will proceed to an actual jury trial. And yet, when
federal prosecutors describe their jobs and what the profession
means to them, the jury is a central theme. Anna Offit's The
Imagined Juror examines the counterintuitive importance of jurors
in federal prosecutors' work at a moment when jury trials are
statistically in decline. Drawing on extensive field research among
federal prosecutors, the book represents "the first ethnographic
study of US attorneys," according to legal scholar Annelise Riles.
It describes a world of legal practice in which jurors are
frequently summoned-as make-believe audiences for proposed
arguments, hypothetical evaluators of evidence, and invented
decision-makers who would work together to reach a verdict. Even
the question of moving forward with a prosecution often hinges on
how federal prosecutors assume a jury will react to elements of the
case-an exercise where the perspectives of the public are imagined
and incorporated into every stage of trial preparation. Based on
these findings, Offit argues that the decreasing number of jury
trials at the federal level has not eliminated the influence of the
jury but altered it. As imaginary figures, jurors continue to play
an important and understudied role in shaping the work and
professional identities of federal prosecutors. At the same time,
imaginary jurors are not real jurors, and prosecutors at times
caricature the public by leaning on stereotypes or preconceived and
simplistic ideas about how laypeople think. Imagined jurors, it
turns out, are a critical, if flawed, resource for introducing lay
perspective into the legal process. As Offit shows, recentering
laypeople and achieving the democratic promise of our legal system
will require renewed commitment to the jury trial and juries that
reflect the diversity of the American public.
Who are the agents of financial regulation? Is good (or bad)
financial governance merely the work of legislators and regulators?
Here Annelise Riles argues that financial governance is made not
just through top-down laws and policies but also through the daily
use of mundane legal techniques such as collateral by a variety of
secondary agents, from legal technicians and retail investors to
financiers and academics and even computerized trading programs.
Drawing upon her ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the
Japanese derivatives market, Riles explores the uses of collateral
in the financial markets as a regulatory device for stabilizing
market transactions. How collateral operates, Riles suggests, is
paradigmatic of a class of low-profile, mundane, but indispensable
activities and practices that are all too often ignored as we think
about how markets should work and be governed. Riles seeks to
democratize our understanding of legal techniques, and demonstrate
how these day-to-day private actions can be reformed to produce
more effective forms of market regulation.
"Documents" reflects on the new challenges to humanistic social
science in a world in which the subjects of research increasingly
share the professional passions and problems of the researcher.
Documents are everywhere in modern life, from the sciences to
bureaucracy to law; at the same time, fieldworkers document social
realities by collecting, producing, and exchanging documents of
their own. Capping off a generation of reflection and critique
about the promises and pitfalls of ethnographic methods, the
contributors explore how ethnographers conceive, grasp, appreciate,
and see patterns, demonstrating that the core of the ethnographic
method now lies in the way ethnographers respond to, and
increasingly share the professional passions and problems of, their
subjects.
"Sophisticated and provocative. The original and unique focus of
this volume effectively opens up a new arena of critique that will
move ethnography and qualitative inquiry forward in a way that few
other works do."
--George Marcus, Department of Anthropology, Rice University
"This edited collection asks how an understanding of documentary
forms sheds light on the creation and circulation of modern forms
of knowledge, expertise, and governance. This is a major
intervention in how we understand the everyday practice and techne
of the documentary impulse and documentary apparatuses of law,
bureaucratic review, and other institutions of modernity, as well
as linguistic anthropology, literary theory, and law. The topic of
"Documents" is not just of interest because of epistemological
quandaries in the human sciences over textualization and
interpretation, but also because the domains to which we
increasinglyturn our attention are themselves
auto-documentary."--William M. Maurer, Chair and Associate
Professor, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Contributors: Mario Biagioli, Donald Brenneis, Carol Heimer,
Hirokazu Miyazaki, Adam Reed, Annelise Riles, and Marilyn
Strathern.
Annelise Riles is Professor of Law and Anthropology at Cornell
University.
Examines the outsized influence of jurors on prosecutorial
discretion Thanks to television and popular media, the jury is
deeply embedded in the American public's imagination of the legal
system. For the country's federal prosecutors, however, jurors have
become an increasingly rare sight. Today, in fact, less than 2% of
their cases will proceed to an actual jury trial. And yet, when
federal prosecutors describe their jobs and what the profession
means to them, the jury is a central theme. Anna Offit's The
Imagined Juror examines the counterintuitive importance of jurors
in federal prosecutors' work at a moment when jury trials are
statistically in decline. Drawing on extensive field research among
federal prosecutors, the book represents "the first ethnographic
study of US attorneys," according to legal scholar Annelise Riles.
It describes a world of legal practice in which jurors are
frequently summoned-as make-believe audiences for proposed
arguments, hypothetical evaluators of evidence, and invented
decision-makers who would work together to reach a verdict. Even
the question of moving forward with a prosecution often hinges on
how federal prosecutors assume a jury will react to elements of the
case-an exercise where the perspectives of the public are imagined
and incorporated into every stage of trial preparation. Based on
these findings, Offit argues that the decreasing number of jury
trials at the federal level has not eliminated the influence of the
jury but altered it. As imaginary figures, jurors continue to play
an important and understudied role in shaping the work and
professional identities of federal prosecutors. At the same time,
imaginary jurors are not real jurors, and prosecutors at times
caricature the public by leaning on stereotypes or preconceived and
simplistic ideas about how laypeople think. Imagined jurors, it
turns out, are a critical, if flawed, resource for introducing lay
perspective into the legal process. As Offit shows, recentering
laypeople and achieving the democratic promise of our legal system
will require renewed commitment to the jury trial and juries that
reflect the diversity of the American public.
Comparative Law is experiencing something of a renaissance,as legal
scholars and practitioners traditionally outside the discipline
find it newly relevant in projects such as constitution and code
drafting, the harmonization of laws, court decisions, or as a tool
for understanding the globalization of legal institutions. On the
other hand, comparativists within the discipline find themselves
asking questions about the identity of comparative law, what it is
that makes comparative law unique as a discipline, what is the way
forward. This book, designed with courses in comparative law as
well as scholarly projects in mind, brings a new generation of
comparativists together to reflect on the character of their
discipline. It aims to incite curiosity and debate about
contemporary issues within comparative law by bringing the
discipline into conversation with debates in anthropology, literary
and cultural studies, and critical theory. The book addresses
questions such as what is the disciplinary identity of comparative
law; how should we understand its relationship to colonialism,
modernism, the Cold War, and other wider events that have shaped
its history; what is its relationship to other projects of
comparison in the arts, social sciences and humanities; and how has
comparative law contributed at different times and in different
parts of the world to projects of legal reform. Each of the essays
frames its intervention around a close reading of the life and work
of one formative character in the history of the discipline. Taken
as a whole, the book offers a fresh and sophisticated picture of
the discipline and its future. Contents: Montesquieu: the specter
of despotism and the origins of comparative law (Robert Launay);
Max Weber and the uncertainties of categorical comparative law
(Ahmed White); Rethinking Hermann Kantorowicz: Free law, American
legal realism and the legacy of anti-formalism (Vivian Grosswald
Curran); Encountering amateurism: John Henry Wigmore and the uses
of American formalism (Annelise Riles); Nobushige Hozumi: A
skillful transplanter of western legal thought into Japanese soil
(Hitoshi Aoki); Sanhuri, comparative law and Islamic legal reform,
or why cultural authenticity is impossible (Amr Shalakany);
Sculpting the agenda of comparative law: Ernst Rabel and the facade
of language (David J. Gerber); Rene David: At the head of the
family (Jorge L. Esquirol); Postmodern-Structural Comparative
Jurisprudence? The aggregate impact of R. B. Schlesinger and R.
Sacco to the understanding of the legal order (Ugo Mattei).
Government bailouts; negative interest rates and markets that do
not behave as economic models tell us they should; new populist and
nationalist movements that target central banks and central bankers
as a source of popular malaise; new regional organizations and
geopolitical alignments laying claim to authority over the global
economy; households, consumers, and workers facing increasingly
intolerable levels of inequality: These dramatic conditions seem to
cry out for new ways of understanding the purposes, roles, and
challenges of central banks and financial governance more
generally. Financial Citizenship reveals that the conflicts about
who gets to decide how central banks do all these things, and about
whether central banks are acting in everyone's interest when they
do them, are in large part the product of a culture clash between
experts and the various global publics that have a stake in what
central banks do. Experts-central bankers, regulators, market
insiders, and their academic supporters-are a special community, a
cultural group apart from many of the communities that make up the
public at large. When the gulf between the culture of those who
govern and the cultures of the governed becomes unmanageable, the
result is a legitimacy crisis. This book is a call to action for
all of us-experts and publics alike-to address this legitimacy
crisis head on, for our economies and our democracies.
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