Law and Anthropology

The great strides that have taken place in the field of anthropology of law have largely been the result of steady extensions of its research agenda into new areas of study and sites of ethnographic research. With an initial emphasis on the legal systems of those living in the context of colonial rule, the field gradually broadened to include other centers of legal power and authority, making the institutions of states and global governance, including the resistance to those powers, ever more central to its subject matter. At the same time, the subdiscipline has taken on the subject matter of law into the everyday sphere, in the ways that law is produced by and has influence upon the sense of justice among ordinary actors.