Paper short abstract:

We argue that anthropologists’ reluctance to engage with legal texts is based on the failure to conceptualize them as an integral part of the practice of the law. Drawing from our work on the International Criminal Court we develop an approach for an ethnography of legal texts.

Paper long abstract:

Even after the writing-culture-debate anthropologists still see reading and interpreting texts as largely antithetical to the idea of ethnography—except when it comes to a self-reflection on the ethnographer’s own writing. In this paper, we reject this narrow notion and make a plea for a concept of ethnography that includes texts as the object of ethnographic investigation. The production, implementation, and interpretation of legal norms depend upon the spoken word and its material inscription in writing. One cannot properly analyse the workings of the law without engaging with doctrinal texts, legal decisions, case files, and court transcripts. We argue that anthropologists’ reluctance to engage with legal texts is based on the referentialist misunderstanding that legal texts merely reflect the practice of the law in a more or less accurate way and the inability to conceive of them as an integral part of such practice. For us, an ethnographic approach suggests that legal texts must be read with three aspects in mind: (1) in an ethnomethodological sense, as the practical accomplishment of particular legal actions (the relevance of which is provided by the specificity of the legal setting); (2) in a Bakhtinian linguistic-anthropological sense, as intertextually embedded in multiple local and trans-local dialogical networks and text trajectories (which connect them with other discourses in- and outside the courtroom); and (3) in a legal-anthropological sense, as encapsulating legal practitioners’ ongoing engagement with a developing corpus of legal theory (and as expressing their metapragmatic strategies for reading and producing such theory).