The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology

Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He studies the intersections of culture, rights, ethics, and justice and is the author or editor of many volumes, including Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (NYU Press, 2017), Human Rights at the Crossroads (ed., Oxford UP, 2013), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (ed., Blackwell, 2010), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (coed. with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge UP, 2007). He is currently writing a new book on justice, ideology, and practice in Bolivia based on nine years of ethnographic research.

Maria Sapignoli is an Assistant Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Milan and cooperation partner in the Law & Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Sapignoli has spent the past ten years conducing ethnographic fieldwork in southern Africa as well as in several international organizations, including the United Nations, on topics of institutional reform, indigenous and minorities rights, social movements and advocacy and, ultimately, justice. Most recently she has started a new project that engages, critically and collaboratively, with the legal and social challenges and opportunities presented by the use of AI technologies and big data in society and in environmental governance. She is the author of Hunting Justice: Displacement, Law, and Activism in the Kalahari (Cambridge University Press 2018), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

Olaf Zenker is Professor of Social Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Focusing on Southern Africa, Northern Ireland and Germany, his research has dealt with politico-legal issues such as conflict and identity formations, plural normative orders, statehood, bureaucracy and the rules of law. His publications include The State and the Paradox of Customary Law in Africa (coed. with Markus Hoehne, Routledge, 2018), South African Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid’s Loose Ends in the Postcolonial Era (coed. with Steffen Jensen, Routledge, 2016) and Transition and Justice: Negotiating the Terms of New Beginnings in Africa (coed. With Gerhard Anders, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). He is currently working on a book on land restitution and the moral modernity of the new South African state.