How Law Matters Now: Laura Nader's Humanistic Empiricism and Where Legal Anthropology Goes From Here

Given the troubling state of law and democracy today, we are in an important moment to consider the unique contributions that legal anthropology and closely related fields provide to studying the lived practices of human meaning-making in moments of conflict and the politics of their resolution. This overview of those fields occurs on the sixtieth anniversary of two famous symposia convened by Professor Laura Nader that dramatically shifted the direction of the subfield of legal anthropology, a development we briefly review along with contributions of other earlier scholars. Turning to recent scholarship in legal anthropology, we examine how newer research moves forward from those roots, alongside research gathered under the rubric of New Legal Realism. These studies document law's irreducibly ideational and material dimensions, demonstrating the need for a humanistic empiricism in legal studies. We suggest that social science and legal scholarship should collaborate in exploring the normative universes in which social groups operate, staying open to studying the “ought” as well as the “is.”