Journal of Legal Anthropology

In a groundbreaking legal claim, a Peruvian farmer is suing a German energy company over climate change impacts. Ethnographically tracing the claimant's journey from the Peruvian Andes to the German courts, this article shows how the lawsuit invokes the notion of corporate personhood to construct an ethically charged relationship between the plaintiff and defendant. However, the legal framework excludes other nonhuman persons such as Andean earth beings. Despite their formal invisibility, the invocation of earth beings provides public justification for a legal claim that has garnered significant media attention. Both within and beyond formal legal frameworks, nonhuman ecosystem persons can play a role in legal and political debates about climate change. Building on work in legal anthropology and discussions about rights of nature, I argue that an attention to the politics of personhood can highlight the socio-material relations at stake in environmental disputes, opening discussions about new forms of political engagement.

Following changes in law and court practices in Pakistan, individuals who have been incarcerated and have mental illnesses in Pakistan experience changing forms of bureaucratic violence as they undergo psychiatric screening. This happens in the context of a move by the Supreme Court of Pakistan to treat mental illness as a mitigating factor in crimes such as blasphemy or murder. The article explores the ways in which ‘patient-prisoners’ are over and under-psychiatrized given the discretionary ways in which psychiatric evidence is used to judge criminality. In some cases, prisoners wait to be labelled ‘mentally sound’ to stand trial and to defend themselves, experiencing pressure to obey discipline in prison despite their severe mental illnesses, representing a modality of under-psychiatrization. In other cases, bureaucratic violence inflicted on patient-prisoners includes over-psychiatrization when state officials seek psychiatric causes for crimes even when they are absent, resulting in delays in court proceedings.

In Europe, calls for ecosystems to be granted rights are mounting. While socio-legal research on the Rights of Nature tends to focus on the strategies of the few success stories, less attention is given to the many failed or stagnated initiatives, many of them in Europe. “Landscaping the Rights of Nature” is both a methodological proposition and an analytical approach to examining procedures available to citizens to introduce the Rights of Nature to the courts of Europe. This article examines three sociopolitical territories from our fieldwork sites in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany in which procedures characteristic of Europe's democratic systems are used to mobilise national legal governance, international networks of lobbying groups, and citizens through artistic interventions. By engaging ethnographically with the wider sociopolitical processes involved in establishing rights for nature, we seek to offer a qualitative view on the possibilities and limitations of Europe's liberal democracies in effecting sociopolitical transformations.

Both the Jordanian state and Jordanian tribes have well-developed justice systems that appear to operate separately but are, in practice, often deeply enmeshed. This article examines these two systems and how they interact. It focuses on a case study—a murder in 2016—and how different actors approached its aftermath. This case provides an example of how both state and tribal justice systems can work in practice. Here, and notwithstanding efforts by some tribal leaders, government officials, and courts to limit, reject, or ignore tribal practices, state and tribal actors facilitate a role for each other while also maintaining their own authority in particular contexts. This adds to understandings of how different legal systems and sources of authority—tribe and state—can operate together, challenging any ostensibly neat categorisation of these systems.