CfP: Journal of Legal Anthropology

Call for Papers and Special Forums:
JOURNAL OF LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY (Peer-Reviewed)
Publishers: Caribbean Law Online and the Anthropologies-in-Translation Group.
http://www.caribbeanlawonline.com/

We invite papers which engage with theoretical, empirical and methodological debates in legal anthropology for our inaugural issue to be published online in May 2008. Submissions may include articles up to 8000 words or essays up to 4000 words in length. We also invite expressions of interest in editing or contributing to special debate forums.

Please contact:
Narmala Halstead, Editor
Email: n.halstead at uel.ac.uk
Heather Horst, Book Reviews Editor
Email: hhorst at berkeley.edu

Mission Statement:

The Journal of Legal Anthropology publishes ethnographic writing and related work on a wide range of issues exploring the significance and presence of legal phenomena in human life worlds. Moving beyond the political, the journal considers, in broad terms, how the legal may enter into social constructions of the persons and how the legal may change meaning in terms of particular 'everyday' interpretations. Through articles, essays and book reviews, the Journal of Legal Anthropology provides spaces for papers and debates which develop theoretical and ethnographic and other approaches to understanding the salience of the legal across a range of social and cultural contexts.
The Journal of Legal Anthropology will also create special forums where anthropologists, linguists, historians and legal practitioners can engage with each other. These forums will take the forms of interactive discussion sections or invited short comments to connect academics in related disciplines and practitioners interested in dialogue. The journal will, thus, provide a forum for engagement between anthropologists, historians, linguists, doctors as well as legal practitioners and others. International in scope, we hope it will be accessible beyond a specialist audience, widening what is understood within the discipline of anthropology as legal and positioning the legal as also 'socio-cultural' in terms of contemporary anthropology. The journal is produced by anthropologists interested in making anthropology accessible (translatable) in other settings and disciplines, and by legal practitioners with support from academics working in human rights, conflict and related areas. The journal will be published twice per year, with plans to move to a quarterly publication.

Call for Papers:

Through a broad remit, the journal considers how humans are known through the law and the ways they know, re-make and un-make the law to demonstrate forms of legal anthropology through a variety of understandings, practices and experiences. It considers the intersections between the legal and the social intersect and how this may allow for potential sites of contradiction vis-à-vis contemporary debates and multiple life-worlds. For instance, howdoes language intervene to form particular contexts between legal phenomena and socio-cultural settings? What are the different cultural settings where notions of tradition and change bound and un-do particular constructions and applications of the legal? This will encompass cultural, political and judicial settings in local and local-global contexts.
We invite papers on variety of topics and subject areas which may include indigenous issues, property rights, local knowledge, cultural practices and the changing boundaries of public and private in different kinds of spaces. Papers may also focus on other contemporary sites which include processes of transnationalism and the cross-border movement of people.

Themes may include:

* Intersections between the law and movement of people
* Citizenship and human rights
* Cultural interpretations and the law in diverse settings
* Connections between different legal settings in terms of 'local knowledge' and cultural practices.
* Domestic violence and movement of people: new kinds of 'legal empowerment vs. 'community mandate.'
* Changing forms of community practices
* Re-appropriation/redefining of the law in social relations
* Legal aspects of media and technology in society
* Online spaces and their boundaries
* Legal definitions of bodies and personhood