Annelise Riles, Cornell University
Legal Fictions: On the comparative study of legal knowledge
I have posted as background to my presentation two forthcoming papers that draw on the same body of ethnographic research among lawyers involved in “papering the trades” in the global financial markets. One paper is directed toward an audience of comparative lawyers; the other is directed toward an anthropology and critical theory audience. The differences between the two papers are perhaps interesting. But what I will focus on in my presentation is the way comparative legal problems, retranslated, illuminate theoretical debates outside the law.
In redescribing, through comparative analysis, the aesthetic, political and epistemological subtleties of legal knowledge, as practiced in transnational contexts, comparative lawyers can make a crucial contribution to contemporary legal problems, from the harmonization of private law to the methodology of conflict of laws. But my contribution to our panel on law and other disciplines will be to argue especially that this descriptive work also stands to make an important contribution to critical theory and cognate fields. My presentation will focus on one example of a legal device that has been at the center of comparative legal studies, the legal fiction.
The Anti-Network: Private Global Governance, Legal Knowledge, and the Legitimacy of the State.
