Teaching Exchange - Claiming rights. Social movements and their ambivalence towards law (David Loher) 05-TE-12-EtnC

Claiming rights. Social movements and their ambivalence towards law
This seminar examines the role of law in social protest movements. The first part compares different theoretical positions on the relationship between law and society’s power structure in legal theory and the philosophy of law. The second and third part compare two main approaches to law and power in the anthropology of law. We examine the anthropological scepticism towards law, expressed in the critique of law as a means to stabilise social inequalities on different scales. And we explore the opposite position that examines how law is used in manifold ways as a ‘weapon of the weak’ in order to protest against social inequality and strive for social change through the transformation of law. In the seminar, we will discuss ethnographic material from my ongoing research on social movements’ legal struggles against the asbestos industry and its deadly legacy. The seminar is at the same time an introduction to some key ideas of the anthropology of law.