Legal Rules in Practice: In the Midst of Law’s Life

We propose a volume which, taking law in and for itself, develops a sensitivity to legal practices, that is, an anthropology of these practices which refer somehow to a legal rule, be it to apply or interpret it, or even to dodge or violate it. Legal rules do not determine the behaviors of people to which they are supposed to apply, but they serve as their point of reference. It is these referring practices that the many contributions will address: how is the rule invoked, referred to, interpreted, put forward, or blurred? How do legal practitioners but also lay participants participate in the construction of facts and rules, conceive the particularity of the former and the generality of the latter, subsume, and articulate the ones to the others so as to produce decisions? How are notions of person, evidence, intention, cause, and responsibility formulated in the constraining context of a trial? By so doing, the contributions to this volume will converge in the production of a praxeological anthropology of law, a socio-anthropology that focuses on words, concepts, and reasoning as used to solve conflicts with the help of legal rules.