Teacher	Bart Klem
Room	303
Time	10:15 - 12:00
Slides	Click here
Preparation	Please read: Kennedy, David (1985) “Spring Break”, 63 Tex. L. Rev. 1377.Links to an external site. Riles, Annelise (2004) “Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage”, American Anthropologist, 108(1): 52–65.

In this first preliminary class, we will lay some ground work for the rest of the course. What does it mean to study human rights? In part of that question directs us to legal frameworks and the international norms and monitoring mechanism that have been established, but it also directs us to the need to study the complexities of everyday reality, which raises challenges around the conceptual and methodological framework we adopt to make sense of the way people go about their lives. What does it mean to say someone has a particular right? This could be taken to mean that this right is established in law (she has the right on paper) or that this right is an empirical reality (she is actually able to exercise the right).

In this course, we deliberately orient ourselves at apparently marginal spaces: situations where the foundations and ramifications of legal norms are not so straightforward and raise fundamental questions about the conceptual underpinnings of human rights. While this is not a course in legal ethnography, anthropological texts (such as the preparatory reading for today) offer us ideas, angles and insights to grapple with the convoluted legal landscapes that we will encounter in the coming few weeks.

Additional reading/resources (not mandatory)

Charlesworth, Hillary and Emma Larking (2015) Human Rights and the Universal Periodic Review: Rituals and Ritualism. Cambridge University Press

Engle Merry, Sally (1992) “Anthropology, law, and transnational processes”. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 357 – 379.

Engle Merry, Sally (2014) “Global Legal Pluralism and the Temporality of Soft Law.” Special Issue on Temporalities of Law, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 46 (1): 108-122.

Goodale, Mark (2006) “Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights”, Current Anthropology, 47(3): 485–511.

Harris, Olivia (ed)(1996) Inside and outside the law : anthropological studies of authority and ambiguity. London: Routledge.

Johns, Fleur (2019) “From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State”. Modern Law Review, 82(5): 833-863.

Kennedy, David (1993) “Autumn Weekends: An essay on law and everyday life.” In Law in everyday life / edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns.Links to an external site. Ann Harbor: Michigan University Press.