Journal of Legal Anthropology

I recently experienced one of those unsettling, context-imposing moments that cause the ground underfoot to feel suddenly loose, threatening to dissolve into quicksand – until, that is, the moment passes, as it inevitably seems to do. It happened during a university-wide lecture by Mark Williams, a professor of palaeontology at the University of Leicester and the Palaeontological Association's ‘exceptional lecturer’ for the academic year 2022–2023. This means he was chosen to go on a global tour of universities to give a talk for wider audiences that was intended to show the relevance and importance of palaeontology for questions of global significance. The title of Williams's lecture was ‘The Anthropocene: Planetary Scale Change to the Biosphere and the Future Well-Being of Planet Earth’.

Studies that examine the administration of justice in refugee camps highlight the legal plurality that commonly characterizes such sites, and the normative friction it creates between government and humanitarian institutions and community structures. Drawing upon research among South Sudanese refugees in Uganda and Ethiopia, this article foregrounds the place of transnational networks and temporal experiences in shaping processes of dispute resolution among refugees. South Sudanese refugees regularly turn to community structures to arbitrate disputes, even when these disputes relate to crimes that, under the laws of host states, must be reported to the authorities. As opposed to the individualized formal justice systems of host states, which are limited by borders, community justice links refugees across countries, draws on understandings of past communal events and relationships, prioritizes communal harmony and order, and thus produces a sense of continuity under conditions of dispersal and extreme precarity.

In this article, I draw on the specific case studies of the Xakriabá people and the Judicial District of Manga, and the Maxakali people and the Judicial District of Águas Formosas, both located in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. I examine how criminal justice officials apply dominant concepts of indigeneity in these regional contexts, showing how they arbitrarily construct and deploy the category of Indigenous person based on essentialist assumptions of indigeneity that ignore Indigenous peoples’ self-identification as such. This adds to scholarship on how indigeneity is institutionally conceived and applied within the justice system in ways that contrast with Indigenous notions of it and aim to deny Indigenous persons recognition in legal processes. By providing specific accounts of how Indigenous defendants are treated in the justice system and experience loss of rights, I consider the professional practices of state officials within the broader framework of Brazilian indigenist policies.

This article explores the Concorde crash of 25 July 2000, seeking to show how law and regulation do crucial ontological work in the maintenance of commercial flight, and likely other aspects of modern techno-social arrangements. I argue that law and regulation cannot be seen as an exteriority, constraining and shaping the production of technology, but should be viewed as a component in the production of a physico-legal reality that a machine embodies. The Concorde disaster, by this logic, happened when that reality proved to be inadequate. It sparked a physical redesign of the aircraft, but also an intertwined effort to repair it normatively. Commercial flight is thus a total phenomenon comprising physical and social laws. This, I suggest, is the ontological significance of law and regulation in the production and maintenance of airliners.

This interdisciplinary forum convenes a wide-ranging conversation centred around the writings of Denise Ferreira da Silva, whose unrelenting inquiry locates the workings of raciality in the very constitution of the modern subject, and, relatedly, global and historical consciousness. Da Silva's excavation of raciality is consequently expansive in its implications and fundamental in its focus. Throughout her oeuvre, including Unpayable Debt (2022) and Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), the crucial role of ‘law’ in legitimizing the modern, global racial and economic order remains a central problem. Da Silva's decolonial agenda will meet with immediate sympathy from many in anthropology – a discipline that has engaged in sustained auto-critique of its own complicity in racialized colonial rule for decades (see Asad 1975; Lewis 1973; Pels and Salemink 2000; for a contemporary instance, cf. Price 2011). However, da Silva shows that any narrow focus on specific direct linkages to related problematics of knowledge production occludes the constitutive role of modern subjectivity in the globalization of modern juridical rule itself. The ambition of da Silva's excavation addresses, among other things, such recurring questions for legal anthropology as: ‘who has law and in what sense can different populations be said to have law?’; ‘how has the idea of “law” helped to reproduce the very world wrought by the post-Enlightenment?’; and ‘How might we test the limits of law?’