Jessica Greenberg

Inspired by the 1966 Wenner-Gren Ethnography of Law Symposium we aim to reclaim the critical empirical commitments of legal ethnographies. Picking up on that Symposium’s call for the empirical investigation of the legal process, this workshop recenters legal knowledge and praxis as ethnographic objects. Rather than taking abstract jurisprudential debates and presuppositions about the role of law and legal actors at face value, we propose interrogating them from the inside out. This week-long event will take stock of the influence of ethnographic studies of law in anthropology, retrieving and conceptualizing a critical, humanistic empirics amidst contemporary challenges to the discipline. Funding would support an intensive, collaborative workshop, to be held at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law from July 21-24, 2025. We will build on and develop the initial lines of inquiry raised at an earlier conference (already planned for and funded by UC Irvine) and chart new paths forward for legal anthropology. Aside from the usual exchange of ideas, we anticipate participants will prepare articles for a special issue of a refereed journal. Contributions will bridge normative, humanistic, and sociological approaches through attention to legal ideology as legal practice.