As a legal scholar, I find formal law—what the law is—to be intricate, impactful, and worth studying. As an anthropologist, I think that human experience of the law extends far beyond formal rules and is worth studying directly and carefully through extended fieldwork.

Between 2018–2021, I organized a series of in-person and virtual roundtables around the theme “What’s Law Got To Do With It?” I guest-edited two special journal issues that published essays emerging from these conversations in the Alabama Law Review and Law & Social Inquiry.

I’ve also been involved in other collective efforts to bring anthropology and law together. In 2020, Anna Offit and I co-edited a special virtual issue of the Law and Society Review. In 2022, I organized a symposium on the concept of “constitutional ethnography” first proposed by Kim Lane Scheppele in 2004. This symposium produced a collection of essays published in ICONnect, the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.