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.

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.

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).

"Networks" and other artifacts of institutional life--documents, funding proposals, newsletters, organizational charts--are such ubiquitous aspects of the "information age" that they go unnoticed to most observers. In this work, Annelise Riles takes a sophisticated theoretical approach to examine the aesthetics of these artifacts and practices, to learn what their very forms and formats can tell us about knowledge and legality in today's world.
The immediate subject of Riles's ethnographic work was a group of Fijian bureaucrats and activists preparing for and participating in the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. Participants in this meeting and the activities surrounding it understood themselves to be "focal points" in national, regional, and global "networks."
Starting from the premise that anthropologists are "inside" the Network, that is, that they are producers, consumers, and aesthetes, not simply observers, of the artifacts of late modern institutional life, Riles enacts a new ethnographic method for turning the network "inside out." The resulting experiment in the theory and ethnography of transnational institutional practices makes an important contribution to the anthropology of knowledge.
With its focus on developing a method for studying transnational phenomena, "The Network Inside Out" will appeal not only to anthropologists, but also to legal scholars and political scientists.
Annelise Riles is Assistant Professor, Northwestern University School of Law, Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation.