Finding Nomos: Revisiting Legal Anthropology’s Critical Empirical Grounds. A Workshop on How Law Matters
Coordinators: Jessica Greenberg (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), Grigory Gorbun (University of Chicago/University of Mississippi), Rob Gelles (University of Chicago), Justin B. Richland (University of California Irvine/American Bar Foundation)
250716_programme_v4.pdfDescription of the meeting
The rule of law faces mounting challenges in what may be the “twilight” of late liberalism. Authoritarian and populist leaders have captured constitutional and judicial orders, raising the stakes for rule of law norms already unsettled by rising lawfare. While “crisis” narratives ought to inspire careful skepticism, both legal institutionalists and their critics have persistently struggled to make sense of law’s destabilization—at the heart of which lies a blurring of its anchoring distinction between law and politics. Discerning how law matters, how it materializes full of consequential meanings in everyday legal practice, requires more than discerning the political dimensions of law or the legal dimensions of politics.
This workshop aims to develop an analytic approach to meet law’s current critical moment. It draws together scholars trained across three continents to interrogate law as an object of inquiry and as a material and social phenomenon that inheres in but is not exhausted by its normative forms. We take inspiration from the pivotal Wenner-Gren Symposia in legal anthropology held in 1964 and 1966, renewing Laura Nader’s call to ask anew how law matters. Together, we consider mattering in two senses of the word: law’s salience and law’s materiality. We ask how lawyers, judges, activists, legal educators, diplomats, scientists, and community organizations see legal frameworks and forms as a means of responding to the limits of human agency in an impossibly complex and often violent world. Here law matters precisely because it both shapes and is an infrastructure for communication, coordination, and action as people inhabit and enact its normative forms and distinctions. In so doing, this workshop can sharpen the conceptual tools of anthropology of law and sociolegal studies as it comes to grips with law’s simultaneous and irreducibly ideational and material characteristics.
Our experience in Oñati
Finding Nomos: Revisiting Legal Anthropology’s Critical Empirical Grounds was hosted at the Oňati International Institute for the Sociology of Law from July 20-24, 2025. Our goal was to generate a common conversation, shared questions and set of analytic terms grounded in individual case studies. We also sought to bridge themes, theoretical and disciplinary traditions. Our guiding questions were: why, when and how does law matter, in what contexts, and with which interlocutors and audiences. The group addressed the “mattering” of law in all the senses of the word: law’s material, ideological, embodied, discursive forms and all the connective tissues that crosscut and bind them. The workshop gathered 16 participants, including paper authors, discussants and observers from North America, South America and Europe. Through intensive discussion, workshopping of paper drafts, and structured opportunities for in depth reading and feedback, the group explored issues of method, how to define a legal-empirical object of study, and how to bridge legal, doctrinal and qualitative social scientific methods. Papers and conversation addressed themes of violence and exception, policing, borders, humanitarian reason, new evidentiary practices, the performance and embodiment of legal authority, sovereignty, semiotic and language ideologies in legal praxis, the role of legal institutions, and the relationship between law and democracy, among others. By working through our specific historical, empirical, ethical, political and analytic commitments we sought to arrive at a renewed commitment to anthropological and empirically ground focus on law that takes seriously law’s normative commitments and limits. In this, we sought to, and achieved, a group commitment to empirical legal analysis- empirical broadly defined, and maybe contested, but based on open, curious engagement with the world. In addition to lively conversation, the group generated a collective archive composed of our papers, collected notes, recorded minutes of each workshop session, and comments from our three discussants. We will use this archive, our collective conversation to seed new collaborations and discussion in future iterations.
Workshop Coordination Team
Avenida de la Universidad, 8
Apartado 28
20560 Oñati (Gipuzkoa) - Spain
T: +34 943 78... Ver teléfono
E: workshop@iisj.es
