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 T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

L AW A N D
A N T H ROP OL O G Y
 The Oxford Handbook of

LAW AND
ANTHROPOLOGY
Edited By
MARIE-​C LAIRE FOBLETS, MARK GOODALE,
MARIA SAPIGNOLI, OLAF ZENKER

1
 3
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 Contents

Acknowledgements xi
About the Contributors xiii

Introduction: Mapping the Field of Law and Anthropology 1

Marie-​Claire Foblets, Mark Goodale, Maria Sapignoli,
and Olaf Zenker

PA RT I G L OBA L P E R SP E C T I V E S ON L AW
A N D A N T H ROP OL O G Y
1. Social Control through Law: Critical Afterlives 19
Carol J. Greenhouse
2. Anthropology, Law, and Empire: Foundations in Context 36
Martin Chanock
3. South African Legal Culture and Its Dis/​Empowerment Paradox 56
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks
4. The Ethnographic Gaze on State Law in India 73
Pratiksha Baxi
5. The Anthropology of Indigenous Australia and Native Title Claims 94
Paul Burke
6. Encountering Indigenous Law in Canada 112
Brian Thom
7. Russian Legal Anthropology: From Empirical Ethnography to
Applied Innovation 132
Florian Stammler, Aytalina Ivanova, and Brian Donahoe
8. Indigenous Peoples, Identity, and Free, Prior, and Informed
Consultation in Latin America 153
Armando Guevara Gil
vi   Contents

9. Rule of Law and Media in the Making of Legal Identity in Urban

Southern China 174
Dodom Kim
10. Islam, Law, and the State 192
Dominik M. Müller
11 Law and Anthropology in the Netherlands: From Adat Law School
to Anthropology of Law 210
Keebet von Benda-​Beckmann
12. Legal Uses of Anthropology in France in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries 228
Frédéric Audren and Laetitia Guerlain
13. Legal Ethnology and Legal Anthropology in Hungary 243
Balázs Fekete
14. The Anthropology of European Law 262
Michele Graziadei

PA RT I I R E C U R R I N G T H E M E S I N L AW
A N D A N T H ROP OL O G Y
15. Within and Beyond the Anthropology of Language and Law 283
Elizabeth Mertz
16. Law as an Enduring Concept: Space, Time, and Power 300
Anne Griffiths
17. Legalism: Rules, Categories, and Texts 318
Fernanda Pirie
18. Legal Transfer 333
Günter Frankenberg
19. Legal Traditions 352
Thomas Duve
20. The Concept of Positive Law and Its Relationship to Religion
and Morality 368
Baudouin Dupret
 Contents   vii

21. Property Regimes 381

Matthew Canfield
22. Law & Development 400
Markus Böckenförde and Berihun A. Gebeye
23. Rights and Social Inclusion 420
Mark Goodale
24. Human Rights Activism, Sexuality, and Gender 436
Lynette J. Chua

PA RT I I I A N T H ROP OL O G Y I N L AW
A N D L E G A L P R AC T IC E
25. The Cultural Defence 455
Alison Dundes Renteln
26. Cultural Rights and Cultural Heritage as a Global Concern 475
Andrzej Jakubowski
27. Alternative Dispute Resolution 493
Faris E. Nasrallah
28. Justice after Atrocity 515
Richard A. Wilson
29. Kinship through the Twofold Prism of Law and Anthropology 532
Marie-​Claire Foblets
30. Environmental Justice 550
Dirk Hanschel and Elizabeth Steyn

PA RT I V A N T H ROP OL O G Y AT
T H E L I M I T S OF L AW
31. Constitution-​Making 573
Felix-​Anselm van Lier and Katrin Seidel
32. Vigilantism and Security-​Making 592
Jennifer Burrell
viii   Contents

33. The Normative Complexity of Private Security: Beyond Legal

Regulation and Stigmatization 608
Math Noortmann and Juliette Koning
34. Humanitarian Interventions 626
Erica Bornstein
35. Inequality, Victimhood, and Redress 644
Rita Kesselring
36. Anti-​discrimination Rules and Religious Minorities in
the Workplace 661
Katayoun Alidadi
37. Transnational Agrarian Movements, Food Sovereignty, and Legal
Mobilization 679
Priscilla Claeys and Karine Peschard
38. The Juridification of Politics 701
Rachel Sieder
39. The Persistence of Chinese Rights Defenders 716
Sara L. M. Davis

PA RT V C U R R E N T DI R E C T ION S I N L AW
A N D A N T H ROP OL O G Y
40. The Problem of Compliance and the Turn to Quantification 737
Sally Engle Merry
41. Law, Science, and Technologies 754
Bertram Turner and Melanie G. Wiber
42. Politics of Belonging 772
Olaf Zenker
43. Legal and Anthropological Approaches to International
Refugee Law 792
Katia Bianchini
44. Norm Creation beyond the State 808
Philipp Dann and Julia Eckert
 Contents   ix

45. Critique of Punitive Reason 827

Didier Fassin
46. Global Legal Institutions 842
Maria Sapignoli and Ronald Niezen
47. Law as Technique 860
Ralf Michaels and Annelise Riles
48. Emotion, Affect, and Law 879
Kamari Maxine Clarke
49. Legal Pluralism in Postcolonial, Postnational, and
Postdemocratic Times 899
Eve Darian-​Smith

Index 917
 Acknowledgements

This is a collective volume in the truest sense of the term. It has benefitted greatly from
the input of all those who have been prepared to contribute to it, either by submitting an
individual chapter or by serving as discussants or reviewers and who, by posing chal-
lenging and insightful questions and comments, indisputably left their mark on this
collective endeavour. Without mentioning them by name here, we as editors wish to ex-
press our profound gratitude to them.
Special thanks go to Dr Brian Donahoe. We are confident that we speak for everyone
involved in the volume when we say that it would have been impossible to carry out this
long-​term publication project without his continuous and very generous efforts, which
included both his organizational and editorial skills and his invaluable intellectual guid-
ance. His stewardship of the volume was an essential task that kept the many interrelated
processes moving forward over the years. He was in communication with every single
author and painstakingly followed the genesis of each chapter, from the very first version
to the final proofs, without ever losing his patience or showing signs of discouragement.
For a volume of this size, this is no minor achievement. Trained in legal anthropology
himself, he offered input that touched not only on the form but, more importantly, on
the content of some decisive arguments. Brian Donahoe’s contribution to this publica-
tion is reflected not only in the individual chapters, but throughout the volume itself,
which is imbued with his supportive spirit and valuable insights.
Sincere thanks also go to the entire team at Oxford University Press, especially Jamie
Berezin, who commissioned the project, and Brianne Bellio, who worked very closely
with us as she ushered the project through the various stages of production.
While we were working on this Handbook, we were saddened to learn that Sally Engle
Merry (1944–​2020) had passed away. Sally played an absolutely central role in different
ways in the development of this volume. She lent her support from the outset to the for-
mation of the Law & Anthropology Department, including by serving as a member of
its Consultative Committee, where the idea of this Handbook was first discussed in 2014.
Her last visit to Germany was in December 2018, when she kicked off the editorial con-
ference for this volume as the first keynote discussant.
Sally was an invaluable and inexhaustible source of inspiration for a great many au-
thors who contributed to this volume. She had a decisive impact on both their thinking
and the kind of research they undertook. In her own unprecedented way, she was a very
future-​oriented thinker and prescient regarding a number of core themes that are ad-
dressed in this volume. She herself published pioneering work on many of those themes:
legal pluralism, gender, human rights, translation and vernacularization, and law and
xii   Acknowledgements

quantitative indicators, to name but a few. She has left us orphans in many respects, but
her legacy is so rich that it will most certainly remain with us for many years to come.
This volume can be seen as a tribute to her, along with several others that have already
been published in her honour.
All expenses associated with this project, including the conference held in Berlin in
December 2018, were borne by the Law & Anthropology Department of the Max Planck
Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.
 About the contributors

Katayoun Alidadi is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at Bryant University in

Smithfield, Rhode Island and Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Her research focuses on comparative law, human
rights, employment law, and the intersections of law and religion. She is the author of
Religion, Equality and Employment in Europe: The Case for Reasonable Accommodation
(Hart, 2017) and co-​editor of A Test of Faith: Religious Diversity and Accommodation in
the European Workplace (Routledge, 2012), Belief, Law and Politics. What Future for a
Secular Europe? (Routledge, 2014), and Public Commissions on Cultural and Religious
Diversity: Analysis, Reception and Challenges (Routledge, 2018).
Frédéric Audren is Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific
Research (CNRS) and Professor of Law at the Sciences Po Law School in Paris. His re-
search is devoted to the history of legal knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies and to the history of social sciences. He was a founding member of the Revue
d’histoire des sciences humaines and of Clio@Thémis: Revue électronique européenne
d'histoire du droit.
Pratiksha Baxi is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and
Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research engages with critical perspec-
tives on medical jurisprudence, ethnographies of courts, sociology of violence, gender
studies, politics of judicial reform, judicial iconography, courtroom architecture, and
feminist legal theory in and beyond India. Her publications include Public Secrets of
Law: Rape Trials in India (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Keebet von Benda-​Beckmann is the former Co-​Head of the Project Group ‘Legal
Pluralism’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. With her late husband
Franz von Benda-​Beckmann, she conducted decades of anthropological research in
the social working of law under conditions of legal pluralism in Indonesia. Among her
many books is Political and Legal Transformations of an Indonesian Polity: The Nagari
from Colonisation to Decentralisation (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Katia Bianchini is a researcher in the Department of Law & Anthropology at the Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She holds a Ph.D. in law from the University
of York, UK. From 2015 to 2018, she was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute
for Ethnic and Religious Diversity in Göttingen. Before engaging in research, she prac-
tised immigration law in England and the United States for ten years. Her publications
xiv   About the contributors

include the book Protecting Stateless Persons: The Implementation of the Convention
Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons across EU States (Brill/​Nijhoff, 2018).
Markus Böckenförde is Associate Professor and Chair of the Comparative
Constitutional Law Programme at Central European University (CEU)’s Department of
Legal Studies. Before joining CEU, he was the Founding Executive Director of the Centre
for Global Cooperation Research at the University Duisburg-​Essen (2012–​2018). As head
of the advisory team to the Policy Planning Staff at the German Ministry for Economic
Cooperation and Development (Bonn–​Berlin) in 2011–​2012, he gained first-​hand ex-
perience in political decision-​making. From 2009 to 2011, he was Programme Officer
and temporarily Acting Programme Manager for the Constitution Building Project at
International IDEA, Stockholm, Sweden. Between 2001 and 2008, Böckenförde was the
Head of Africa Projects and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for
Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg. In 2006–​2007,
he was seconded by the German Foreign Office to be the legal expert for the Assessment
and Evaluation Commission (AEC) in Sudan, which was mandated to support and
supervise the implementation of the Sudanese Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
Erica Bornstein is Professor of Anthropology at University of Wisconsin-​Milwaukee.
A political and legal anthropologist, her research interests include non-​governmental
organizations (NGOs), voluntary sector regulation, and humanitarianism. She is the
author of two monographs: The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and
Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford, 2005) and Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New
Delhi (Stanford, 2012), and, and is co-​editor of Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism
between Ethics and Politics (School for Advanced Research Press, 2011). She is currently
writing a book on the regulation of non-​profits, philanthropy, and civil society in India.
Paul Burke has had a long career as both a lawyer and an anthropologist. In the legal
phase of his career, he appeared as a lawyer for claimants in land claims in the Northern
Territory, Australia. Since his conversion to anthropology, he has worked as an anthro-
pologist on native title claims. His first book, Law’s Anthropology: From Ethnography
to Expert Testimony in Native Title (Australian National University Press, 2011), is a
Bourdieu-​inspired account of the interaction of law and anthropology in native title
claims. His most recent work, An Australian Indigenous Diaspora: Warlpiri Matriarchs
and the Refashioning of Tradition (Berghahn, 2018), is a detailed ethnographic account
of the cultural implications of Indigenous migration away from traditional country. He
is currently an honorary lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the
Australian National University.
Jennifer Burrell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University at Albany
SUNY, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Latin American, Caribbean,
and US Latino Studies. She is the author of Maya after War (University of Texas Press,
2013) and co-​editor (with Ellen Moodie) of Central America in the New Millennium
(Berghahn, 2013). She has recently co-​edited (with Ellen Moodie) two special collec-
tions, ‘Beyond the Migrant Caravan’ in Cultural Anthropology (2019) and ‘Generations
 About the contributors    xv

and Political Lives in Central America’ in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean
Anthropology (2020).
Matthew Canfield is Assistant Professor of Law and Society & Law and Development
in the Van Vollenhoven Institute at Leiden Law School. His research examines the law
and governance of global food security, specifically focusing on how social movements
are formulating new social justice claims and practices of mobilization in response to
changing forms of food and agricultural regulation. He is the author of Translating Food
Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance (Stanford, 2022),
as well as articles in Public Culture, Law & Society Review, Transnational Legal Theory,
and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, among other journals.
Martin Chanock has degrees in history and law from the University of the
Witwatersrand. His legal education was in both civil and common law and allowed him
to escape the prisons of both traditions. After leaving South Africa in 1965, he took a
Ph.D. in history from Cambridge, and went on to teach history at universities in East
and West Africa, at the University of Sussex, and the University of Texas in Austin. In
1977, he joined the inter-​disciplinary School of Legal Studies (later the School of Law)
at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and accidentally stayed forever. He has published
widely on legal history in colonial and postcolonial situations, including two books:
Law, Custom and Social Order (Cambridge, 1985) and The Making of South African Legal
Culture (Cambridge, 2001). He is currently working on a book on constitutional illu-
sions in Africa. Another major area of engagement has been in questions of how and
what to teach about law in universities.
Lynette J. Chua is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Yale–​NUS College,
National University of Singapore. She is a law-​and-​society scholar with research inter-
ests in legal mobilization, legal consciousness, rights, and social movements. She is the
author of Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State
(Temple University Press, 2014) and The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization
and Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford University Press, 2019).
Priscilla Claeys is Associate Professor in Food Sovereignty, Human Rights and
Resilience at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University
(UK). She received her Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the University of
Louvain (UCL) in 2013. From 2008 to 2014, she worked as a Special Advisor to Olivier
De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. Her research areas include
the right to food and food sovereignty, agrarian movements, global food governance,
legal mobilization, and the creation of new human rights. She has published Human
Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement: Reclaiming Control (Routledge, 2015) and
co-​edited two books. Her research has notably featured in the Journal of Peasant Studies,
Sociology, and Globalizations.
Kamari Maxine Clarke is Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Socio-​
legal Studies at the University of Toronto. Trained in anthropology and law, she has
xvi   About the contributors

spent her career exploring theoretical questions of culture and power, detailing the re-
lationship between new transnational formations and contemporary problems. Her ac-
claimed book Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of
Legal Pluralism (Cambridge University Press, 2009) analyses how human rights con-
ceptions are negotiated in global legal plural contexts, especially regarding international
criminal law. Her most recent book, Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court
and the Pan-​Africanist Pushback (Duke University Press, 2019), is concerned with chal-
lenges over the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court in Africa.
Philipp Dann is Professor and Chair of Public and Comparative Law at Humboldt
University Berlin. His research focuses on the encounter of the Global South and North
in all registers of public law. He is Editor-​in-​Chief of the journal World Comparative
Law. His recent publications include (with Jochen von Bernstorff) The Battle for
International Law in the Decolonization Era (Oxford University Press, 2019), (with
Michael Riegner and Maxim Bönnemann) The Global South and Comparative
Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2020) and (with Arun Thiruvengadam)
Democratic Constitutionalism in India and the EU (Edward Elgar, 2021).
Eve Darian-​Smith is Professor and Chair of Global Studies at the University of
California, Irvine. Trained as a lawyer, historian, and anthropologist, she is interested in
issues of postcolonialism, legal pluralism, global governance, human rights, authoritar-
ianism, and socio-​legal theory. She is a prize-​winning author and has published widely,
including eleven books and edited volumes and numerous articles in the fields of an-
thropology, global studies, history, and law and society. Darian-​Smith serves on seven
editorial boards and is an invited board member of Contemporary Social Science: Journal
of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK).
Sara L. M. Davis is Senior Researcher leading the Digital Health and Rights Project at
the Global Health Centre, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies,
Geneva. She is the author of Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest
Borders (Columbia University Press, 2005) and The Uncounted: Politics of Data in Global
Health (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Davis was founding executive director of
Asia Catalyst, Senior Human Rights Advisor at the Global Fund, and earned her Ph.D.
at the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked as a consultant with the Joint United
Nations Programme on HIV/​AIDS (UNAIDS), the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), and international civil society advocacy networks. Her current
research focuses on digital technologies, artificial intelligence, health, and human rights.
Brian Donahoe is Senior Scientific Editor of the Law & Anthropology Department at
the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. He holds an M.A. in
journalism and a Ph.D. in anthropology, both from Indiana University. He conducted
long-​term fieldwork among the hunting and reindeer-​herding communities of the
Saian Mountain region in southern Siberia (Tozhu, Tofa, Soiot, and Dukha), and has
published on the politics of indigeneity in Russia. He is co-​editor of two volumes (with
Joachim Otto Habeck) Reconstructing the House of Culture: Community, Self and the
 About the contributors    xvii

Makings of Culture in Russia and Beyond (Berghahn, 2011) and (with Julia Eckert, Zerrin
Özlem Biner, and Christian Strümpell) Law against the State: Ethnographic Forays into
Law’s Transformations (Cambridge, 2012).
Baudouin Dupret studied law, Islamic sciences, and political sciences. He is
Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
He is also guest lecturer at the University of Louvain (Belgium). He has published
extensively in the fields of sociology and anthropology on law, legislation, and
media, especially in the Middle East. He has (co-​)edited numerous volumes, the
most recent being (with Michael Lynch and Tim Berard) Law at Work: Studies in
Legal Ethnomethods (Oxford, 2015) and (with Julie Colemans and Max Travers)
Legal Rules in Practice: In the Midst of Law’s Life (Routledge, 2020), and single-​au-
thored several books, including Practices of Truth: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry
into Arab Settings (Benjamins, 2011), Adjudication in Action: An Ethnomethodology
of Law, Morality and Justice (Routledge, 2011), What Is the Sharia? (Hurst, 2017),
and Positive Law from the Muslim World: Jurisprudence, History, Practices
(Cambridge, 2021).
Thomas Duve is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal
Theory, and Professor of Comparative Legal History at Goethe University (both
in Frankfurt). He works principally on the legal history of the imperial spaces of the
Iberian monarchies in the early modern period, especially the history of early modern
canon law and moral theology, as well as the history of legal practices.
Julia Eckert is Professor of Political Anthropology at the University of Bern,
Switzerland. Her research focuses on the transnationalization of legal norms, the
anthropology of crime and punishment, changing notions of responsibility and li-
ability, security, and citizenship. Her publications include The Charisma of Direct
Action (Oxford University Press, 2003), Law against the State: Ethnographic Forays
into Law’s Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2012), The Bureaucratic
Production of Difference: Ethos and Ethics in Migration Administrations (tran-
script Verlag, 2020), and ‘Legal Responsibility in an Entangled World’ (Journal of
Legal Anthropology 4 (2) 2020). She is also co-editor of the journal Anthropological
Theory.
Didier Fassin is the Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton and holds a Direction of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales in Paris. Based on research conducted on three continents, his work focuses
on political and moral issues in contemporary societies. A former Vice- President
of Médecins Sans Frontières, he is currently the President of the French Medical
Committee for Exiles. His books include Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of
the Present (University of California Press, 2011), Enforcing Order: Ethnography of
Urban Policing (Polity, 2013), The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press, 2018), Life: A
Critical User’s Manual (Polity, 2018), and Death of a Traveller: A Counter Investigation
(Polity, 2021).
xviii   About the contributors

Balázs Fekete is Associate Professor at the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Law,
Department of Law and Society, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social
Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies, both in Budapest. His main areas of research in-
clude rights consciousness, legal alienation, and comparative legal studies methodology.
His most recent book is Paradigms in Modern Comparative Law. A History (Hart, 2021).
Marie-​Claire Foblets is Director of the Law and Anthropology Department at
the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Honorary Professor of Law &
Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-​Wittenberg, both in Halle/​Saale,
Germany. Trained in law and anthropology, she taught law as well as social and cultural
anthropology at the universities of Antwerp and Brussels and the Catholic University
of Leuven, where she headed the Institute for Migration Law and Legal Anthropology,
before joining the Max Planck Institute. She has also been a member of various net-
works of researchers focusing on the study of the application of Islamic law in Europe
and on law and migration in Europe, paying particular attention to family law. Her nu-
merous publications include Family, Religion and Law: Cultural Encounters in Europe
(Ashgate, 2014).
Günter Frankenberg is Professor of Public Law, Comparative Law, and Jurisprudence
(em.) at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. His main areas of research include au-
thoritarian regimes, comparative constitutionalism, transfer of laws and constitutions,
security regimes and infection protection law. He is the author of Political Technology
and the Erosion of the Rule of Law (Edward Elgar, 2014), Comparative Law as Critique
(Edward Elgar, 2016), Comparative Constitutional Studies—​Between Magic and Deceit
(Edward Elgar, 2018), and Authoritarianism—​Constitutional Perspectives (Edward
Elgar, 2020).
Berihun A. Gebeye is a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck
Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. He was previously a post-
doctoral research fellow at the University of Göttingen and has held visiting fellowships
at Columbia Law School, the Centre for Socio-​Legal Studies at the University of Oxford,
and at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. He has
taught comparative constitutional law and politics at the Central European University,
the University of Yangon, and the University of Göttingen. He holds degrees in law,
human rights, and comparative constitutional law, and has published extensively in
these fields, with a particular focus on Africa. He is the author of A Theory of African
Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Mark Goodale holds a chair at the University of Lausanne, where he is Professor of
Cultural and Social Anthropology and former Director of the Laboratory of Cultural
and Social Anthropology (LACS). The founding Series Editor of Stanford Studies in
Human Rights, he is either author, editor, or co-​editor of fifteen volumes, including (co-​
ed. with Sally Engle Merry) The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the
Global and the Local (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Surrendering to Utopia: An
Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2009), (ed.) Human Rights:
 About the contributors    xix

An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell, 2010), (ed.) Human Rights at the Crossroads

(Oxford University Press, 2013), Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (NYU
Press, 2017), and (ed.) Letters to the Contrary: A Curated History of the UNESCO Human
Rights Survey (Stanford University Press, 2018). His most recent books are A Revolution
in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia (Duke
University Press, 2019) and Reinventing Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2022).
Michele Graziadei is Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Torino and
Collegio Carlo Alberto Fellow, Past President, European Law Faculties Association. He
is the author of over a hundred publications on comparative law, civil law, legal history,
and legal theory. His recent publications include (ed. with Lionel Smith) Comparative
Property Law: Global Perspectives (Edward Elgar, 2018) and (ed. with Marie-​Claire
Foblets and Alison D. Renteln) Personal Autonomy in Plural Societies (Routledge, 2018).
Carol J. Greenhouse is the Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at
Princeton University. She earned her A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.
Her primary research interests lie in the ethnography of law, particularly in relation
to federal power in the United States. Her books include The Paradox of Relevance:
Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011),
(ed.) Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and (with
Alfred C. Aman) Transnational Law: Cases and Problems in an Interconnected World
(Carolina Academic Press, 2017). She is past president of the American Ethnological
Society, the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and the Law & Society
Association, and past editor of American Ethnologist. Her work on the ethnography of
law has been recognized by the Law & Society Association and the Association for the
Study of Law, Culture and Humanities. She is a member of the American Philosophical
Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Anne Griffiths is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology of Law at Edinburgh
University. Her research focuses on anthropology of law, comparative and family law,
African law, gender, culture, and rights. Over the years she has held a number of re-
search grants and affiliations, including a research fellowship on Framing the Global at
Indiana University and a senior research fellowship at the International Research Centre
on Work and the Human Lifecycle in Global History, Humboldt University, Berlin. She
has worked with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in
Halle/​Saale, Germany and has had visiting appointments at the International Institute
for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain, the University of Texas-​Austin School of Law,
the Southern and Eastern African Regional Centre for Women’s Law (SEARCWL) at the
University of Zimbabwe, and the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.
Laetitia Guerlain is Professor of Legal History at the University of Bordeaux and a
junior member of the Institut universitaire de France. She works on the history of legal
thought and legal knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a strong
focus on the relationship between legal science and other human and social sciences,
such as sociology and anthropology.
xx   About the contributors

Armando Guevara Gil is a Peruvian legal anthropologist and historian. He holds a law
degree (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú), an M.A. in cultural anthropology
(University of Wisconsin-​Madison), and a Ph.D. in law (University of Amsterdam). He
specializes and publishes in the fields of legal pluralism, colonial and republican law in
the Andes, water law, and Indigenous rights. He was a visiting professor at the University
of Torino (2019) and a guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal
History (Frankfurt, 2019–​2020). He is currently Director of Research at the Universidad
para el Desarrollo Andino (UDEA, Huancavelica, Perú), a professor of law at the
Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC, Lima), an affiliated researcher at the
Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt), and an associate
researcher at the Instituto del Perú (USMP, Lima).
Dirk Hanschel is Professor of German, European and International Public Law at
Martin Luther University Halle-​Wittenberg, Germany. His research focuses on, among
other topics, issues at the junction of environmental law and human rights from inter-
disciplinary perspectives, as well as comparative constitutional law. As a Fellow at the
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, he currently leads a research project en-
titled Environmental Rights in Cultural Context (ERCC). By conducting selected case
studies, the ERCC project aims to examine the extent to which environmental rights
as inscribed in constitutions provide valid norms in the local context in the face of en-
vironmental threats resulting from climate change, mining activities, large-​scale infra-
structure projects, etc. Another of his current research projects, funded by the German
Research Foundation (DFG), focuses on the Indian National Green Tribunal’s im-
plementation of UN Sustainable Development Goal #6 (SDG 6) on clean water and
sanitation.
Aytalina Ivanova is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Arctic Centre of the University
of Lapland (Finland) and Docent in Law at Northeastern Federal University, Yakutsk,
Russia. She earned a Russian Ph.D. (kandidat nauk) in history with a thesis on Sakha
statehood in the early twentieth century. Unusual for a Russian legal scholar, she de-
scribes herself as a fieldwork-​based legal anthropologist with a focus on the lived ex-
perience of the law in the Russian North. She has worked and published on Indigenous
peoples and extractive industries in the Russian North and on Russian Indigenous and
Arctic legislation. She has worked at the Arctic University of Norway (Tromso) and the
Centre for Northeast Asian Studies at Tohoku University (Japan).
Andrzej Jakubowski is affiliated with the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Property Law
at the University of Opole. He also acts as Chair of the Committee on Participation
in Global Cultural Heritage Governance of the International Law Association. He
holds a Ph.D. in international law from the European University Institute in Florence
and an M.A. in art history from the University of Warsaw. His publications include
the monograph State Succession in Cultural Property (Oxford University Press, 2015)
and the edited collection Cultural Rights as Collective Rights: An International Law
Perspective (Brill, 2016). Jakubowski is currently co-​editing, with Ana Filipa Vrdoljak
 About the contributors    xxi

and Alessandro Chechi, a commentary on the 1970 UNESCO and 1995 UNIDROIT
conventions (under contract with Oxford University Press).
Rita Kesselring is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the University of St Gallen,
Switzerland. Her research focuses on inequality, solidarity, corporate practices, urban
development, and memory in South Africa and Zambia. She is the author of Bodies
of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-​Apartheid South Africa (Stanford
University Press, 2017).
Dodom Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her
research explores how legal and technological infrastructures shape the shifting values
of human labour and bodies at the intersection of migration and citizenship. Her cur-
rent project focuses on documentation practices that mediate people’s narratives of their
social and legal mobility as state citizens in southern China. The provisional title of her
forthcoming dissertation is ‘Documenting Uncertainties: Legal Identity, Bureaucratic
Promises, and Mobility in Southern China’.
Juliette Koning is Professor of Business in Society at the School of Business and
Economics, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. She holds a Ph.D. in social anthro-
pology from the University of Amsterdam. Recent research focuses on the privatiza-
tion and organization of security. She recently co-​edited a special issue for Organization
Studies (2020) with Marianna Fotaki and Yochanan Altman titled Spirituality, Symbolism
and Storytelling in Twenty-​First-​Century Organizations. Her latest edited volume (with
Gweneal Njoto-​Feillard) is New Religiosities, Modern Capitalism and Moral Complexities
in Southeast Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Juliette is also Associate Editor of Human
Relations.
Felix-​Anselm van Lier is a public law scholar focusing on constitution-​making pro-
cesses and, more recently, on public procurement. He is a Research and Policy Associate
at the Government Outcomes Lab at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of
Government, where he investigates how new approaches in social policy and outcomes-​
based commissioning can help to better organize the provision of public services. He
was previously a Research Fellow in the Law & Anthropology Department of the Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where he researched the role of technology in
constitution-​making. Lier studied law in Germany and Italy before completing an M.Sc.
in Law and Anthropology at LSE and a D.Phil. in Socio-​Legal Studies at the University
of Oxford. Among other professional positions, he has worked as a consultant for the
Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, Democracy Reporting International, the Berghof
Foundation, and Lawyers for Justice in Libya.
Sally Engle Merry (1944–​2020) was Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York
University, Co-​Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at
the New York University School of Law, and past President of the American Ethnological
Society. Her many research topics over her career included conflict resolution and legal
consciousness, law and colonialism, human rights and gender violence, and global
xxii   About the contributors

technologies of quantification. Her later published volumes include Colonizing Hawai‘i

(Princeton University Press, 2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (University of
Chicago Press, 2006), (co-​edited with Mark Goodale) The Practice of Human Rights
(Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective
(Blackwell, 2009). Her final book, The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human
Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (University of Chicago Press, 2016) exam-
ines indicators as a technology of knowledge used for human rights monitoring and
global governance. She also co-​edited three books on quantification, (with Kevin Davis,
Angelina Fisher, and Benedict Kingsbury) Governance by Indicators: Global Power
through Quantification and Rankings (Oxford University Press, 2012), (with Kevin
Davis and Benedict Kingsbury) The Quiet Power of Indicators (Cambridge University
Press, 2015) and (with Richard Rottenburg, Song-​Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler) A
World of Indicators (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She received the Hurst Prize for
Colonizing Hawai‘i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to sociolegal
scholarship in 2007, the J. I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010,
and the AAA Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology in 2019.
Elizabeth Mertz is a Senior Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, as
well as John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin Law
School. She was Lichtstern Distinguished Research Scholar in Residence 2020–​2021 at
the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago; Katherine and Martin Crane
Fellow at Princeton University’s Programme in Law and Public Affairs; Visiting Scholar
at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, School of Social Science; and Visiting
Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University. She has served as
Editor of Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), as well as of Law & Social
Inquiry. Her research focuses on the language of law, from the semiotics of legal training
to the difficulties of cross-​disciplinary translation as confronted by the New Legal
Realist movement.
Ralf Michaels is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International
Private Law in Hamburg, Germany, Chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University in
London, and Professor of Law at Hamburg University. Until 2019, he was the Arthur
Larson Professor at Duke University School of Law. He is a widely published scholar
of private international law, comparative law, and legal theory. His current research fo-
cuses on decolonial comparative law, regulatory conflicts, and theoretical foundations
of private international law. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, the American
Law Institute, and the Comparative Law Associations of the United States, Germany,
and France.
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks is Associate Professor of Law and Society in the School for
Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts—Boston
and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Public Law at the University of
Cape Town (UCT). She was previously a senior researcher in the Rural Women’s Action
Research Programme at UCT, combining research, advocacy, and policy work on
 About the contributors    xxiii

women, property, governance, and participation under customary law and the South
African Constitution. Mnisi Weeks received her D.Phil. in Law from the University of
Oxford’s Centre for Socio- Legal Studies as a Rhodes Scholar, and previously clerked
for Dikgang Moseneke, then Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court of South
Africa. She is the author of Access to Justice and Human Security: Cultural Contradictions
in Rural South Africa (Routledge, 2018) and co- author of African Customary Law in
South Africa: Post- Apartheid and Living Law Perspectives (OUPSA, 2015).
Dominik M. Müller is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Friedrich
Alexander University Erlangen-​Nuremberg (FAU), where he is also Speaker of the
Elite Graduate Programme ‘Standards of Decision-​Making across Cultures’. He is also
heading the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group ‘The Bureaucratization of Islam and
Its Socio-​Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia’. He is a cooperation partner with the
Law & Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
where he worked from 2016 until 2019, prior to his appointment at FAU.
Faris E. Nasrallah is a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales. He earned
his LLB (first class) from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the
University of London and his LLM from the University of Cambridge. Nasrallah is
specialized in international arbitration, having worked for leading US and international
law firms in London and Dubai. He has represented clients in complex and high-value
international arbitration proceedings and has extensive advocacy experience. He is
currently leading a research project on the relationship between theory and practice in
international arbitration at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle,
Germany, and in 2019 established the International Arbitration Working Group as part
of the Max PlanckLaw Network. With experience as counsel, expert, and arbitrator, his
international arbitration practice focuses on commercial, construction, energy, and
telecommunications disputes, with specialist knowledge of Middle Eastern laws.
Ronald Niezen is Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Department of
Anthropology and Associate Member of the Faculty of Law at McGill University. He
has conducted research on an Islamic reform movement in West Africa, justice cam-
paigns in Indigenous communities in Canada, and the international movement of
Indigenous peoples in the United Nations. His books include The Origins of Indigenism:
Human Rights and the Politics of Difference (University of California Press, 2003), Truth
and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential
Schools (University of Toronto Press, 2017), (co-​edited with Maria Sapignoli) Palaces of
Hope: The Anthropology of Global Organizations (Cambridge University Press, 2017),
and #HumanRights: The Technologies and Politics of Justice Claims in Practice (Stanford
University Press, 2020).
Math Noortmann is Professor of Transnational Law and Non-​State Actors at the
Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR), Coventry University (UK). He
has taught and researched at universities in the Netherlands, Singapore, Germany, and
the United Kingdom. He holds a Ph.D. in International Law and an M.Sc. in Political
xxiv   About the contributors

Science, combining the two disciplines in his transdisciplinary pursuit of knowledge

and understanding of law and politics. He queries the links between security and order,
on the one hand, and justice and human dignity on the other. More specifically, he inves-
tigates the roles of non-​state actors in transnational security governance, in particular,
the private security sector, non-​governmental organizations, and intergovernmental
organizations. He received research funding from ESRC/​AHRC (PaCCS), Newton
(Institutional Links), and ESRC (CREST).
Karine Peschard is Research Associate at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy,
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva). Trained
as an anthropologist, her research interests centre on intellectual property rights,
agrobiodiversity, legal activism, peasant rights, and seed sovereignty, with a focus on
Brazil and India. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS), the
Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and the Annual Review of Anthropology,
as well as in edited books. She is the co-​editor of a Special Forum on Seed Activism
(Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020), and the author of an ethnography of court chal-
lenges to intellectual property rights on biotech crops in Brazil and India (MIT
Press, forthcoming 2022).
Fernanda Pirie is Professor of the Anthropology of Law at the Centre for Socio-​
Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. An anthropologist specializing in Tibetan
societies, she has used her research into legal practices and legal codes to develop
the anthropology of law. The Anthropology of Law (OUP, 2013) builds on themes and
debates developed in the Legalism research group, which she convened with col-
leagues in anthropology and history (Legalism, 4 vols, Oxford University Press). As
well as studying contemporary Tibetan societies, Pirie has written on the legal his-
tory of medieval Tibet (see www.tibetanlaw.org). Her latest book is a global history
of law, The Rule of Laws: A 4,000-​Year Quest to Order the World (Profile Books, Basic
Books, 2021).
Alison Dundes Renteln is Professor of Political Science, Anthropology, Public Policy,
and Law at the University of Southern California. She has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and
Social Policy (Berkeley) and a JD (USC). A public law scholar, she studies international
law, human rights, comparative legal systems, constitutional law, and legal and political
theory. An expert on cultural rights, she served on the State Bar Commission on Access
to Justice and the California Judicial Council Access and Fairness Advisory Committee.
She also served as a member of the California Attorney General’s Commission on
Hate Crimes and was appointed in 2020 to the California State Advisory Committee
to the US Commission on Civil Rights. She has taught judges and attorneys at meet-
ings of the American Bar Association and the National Association of Woman Judges.
She serves on the Board of Trustees for the Law and Society Association and the edi-
torial board of Law and Social Inquiry. Her publications include The Cultural Defense
(Oxford University Press, 2004), Multicultural Jurisprudence (Hart, 2009), Cultural Law
(Cambridge University Press, 2010), Images and Human Rights (Cambridge Scholars,
 About the contributors    xxv

2017), Global Bioethics and Human Rights (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), and many
articles.
Annelise Riles is Executive Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global
Affairs, Associate Provost for Global Affairs, and Professor of Law and Anthropology
at Northwestern University. Based on legal and anthropological research in China,
Japan, and the Pacific, her work focuses on the transnational dimensions of law, mar-
kets, and culture across the fields of private law, conflict of laws, financial regulation,
and comparative legal studies. Her books include The Network Inside Out (University
of Michigan Press, 2000), Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial
Markets (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Financial Citizenship: Experts, Publics,
and the Politics of Central Banking (Cornell University Press, 2018). Annelise Riles
was awarded the Certificate of Merit of the American Society of International Law,
2000–​2001.
Maria Sapignoli is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of
Philosophy Piero Martinetti (University of Milan). She is a cooperation partner of the
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where she is also a member of the sci-
entific committee accompanying the research cluster she contributed to setting up, en-
titled ‘The Anthropology of AI in Policing and Justice’. Sapignoli has spent the past ten
years conducting ethnographic fieldwork in southern Africa, as well as in several inter-
national organizations, including the United Nations, on topics of institutional reform,
Indigenous and minority rights, social movements and advocacy and, ultimately, justice.
Most recently, she has started a new project which engages, critically and collaboratively,
with the legal and social challenges and opportunities presented by the use of artificial
intelligence technologies and big data in society and in environmental governance.
She is the author of Hunting Justice: Displacement, Law, and Activism in the Kalahari
(Cambridge University Press, 2018), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She
is also co-​editor (with Ronald Niezen) of Palaces of Hope: The Anthropology of Global
Organizations (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Katrin Seidel is Senior Research Fellow in the Law & Anthropology Department of
the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany), a former postdoctoral
fellow at Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research, and former
Academic Coordinator of the Joint Network Rule of Law Support at Freie Universität
Berlin, in collaboration with the German Federal Foreign Office. Based on her inter-
disciplinary background (law and African/Asian studies), her research is situated at
the intersection of legal pluralism, heterogeneous statehood, and governance. Seidel’s
studies are concerned with the interdependent relationships between plural normative
and judicial orders at different levels of regulation. Her research and Habilitation project
focused on the local–global nexus of peace and constitution making in the (post-)con-
flict settings of South Sudan and Somaliland.
Rachel Sieder holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of London. She is
Senior Research Professor at the Center for Research and Graduate Studies in Social
xxvi   About the contributors

Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City, where she teaches legal and political anthro-
pology. She is also an associate senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in
Bergen, Norway. She has worked for the past three decades on Central America, and
her research interests include human rights, Indigenous rights, social movements,
Indigenous law, legal anthropology, the state, and violence. Her most recent books in-
clude (with María Teresa Sierra and Rosalva Aída Hernández) Justicias Indígenas y
Estado: Violencias Contemporáneas (FLACSO/​CIESAS, 2013), Demanding Justice and
Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America (Rutgers University
Press, 2017), and (with Karina Ansolabehere and Tatiana Alfonso Sierra) The Routledge
Handbook of Law and Society (Routledge, 2019).
Florian Stammler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Lapland in
Rovaniemi, Finland. He coordinates the European Union’s northernmost anthro-
pology research team and has led multiple Finnish and international Arctic research
projects. Stammler has lived for years in the Russian Arctic, conducting fieldwork with
reindeer herders, government officials, and representatives of extractive industries. He
has published on Indigenous peoples and industrial development, the anthropology
of extractivism, northern nomadic pastoralism, human–​animal relations, oral history,
and the anthropology of well-​being. His publications include Reindeer Nomads Meet
the Market (Lit-​Verlag, 2005) and the edited volumes (with Hugh Beach) People and
Reindeer on the Move (Berghahn, 2006), (with Hiroki Takakura) Good to Eat—​Good
to Live With (Centre for Northeast Asian Studies, 2010), (with Timo Koivurova, Else
Grete Broderstad, Dorothée Cambou, and Dalee Dorough) Routledge Handbook of
Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic (Routledge, 2020), and (with Reeta Toivanen) Young
People, Wellbeing and Sustainable Arctic Communities (Routledge, 2021).
Elizabeth Steyn is Cassels Brock Fellow and Assistant Professor in Mining and Finance
Law at Western University, Canada. She is also a faculty member of the Western Institute
for Earth and Space Exploration. At Western Law, she heads the Mining, Finance
and Sustainability Programme. She is a member of the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law
Foundation (RMMLF), the Natural Resources Law Teachers Institute (NRTLI), the
Canadian Institute of Mining (CIM), and the Prospectors and Developers Association
of Canada (PDAC). At present, she is working on three main projects: the potential do-
mestic liability of transnational extractive companies for abuses committed abroad by
their foreign subsidiaries; regulatory gaps relating to deep-​sea mining; and the devel-
opment of an International Environmental Law (IEL) framework for space mining. The
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) also recently appointed Steyn as
Principal Investigator for the development of Guiding Principles for a Responsible and
Sustainable Mining and Metals Sector to Achieve the Paris Agreement and Sustainable
Development Goals in the Context of the Green Recovery.
Brian Thom is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at the
University of Victoria, where, in 2010, he founded the Ethnographic Mapping Lab
(https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/ethnographicmapping/). He has worked for
 About the contributors    xxvii

more than twenty-​five years with Coast Salish communities in British Columbia on
the recognition of Indigenous land rights and jurisdictions, attending to the cultural
and political priorities of their engagements with the ongoing legacies of colonialism.
From 1994–​1997 and 2000–​2010 he worked as researcher, senior advisor, and nego-
tiator for several Coast Salish First Nations (Canada) engaged in treaty, land claims,
and self-​government negotiations, and currently collaborates with the Centre for
Indigenous Conservation and Development Alternatives (https://cic​ ada.world).
His research focuses on issues of Indigenous territoriality, knowledge, and govern-
ance; revealing contemporary practices of Indigenous law; and clarifying the onto-
logical imperatives behind Indigenous political strategies. Thom’s publications ‘The
Paradox of Boundaries in Coast Salish Territories’ (Cultural Geographies, 2009) and
‘Reframing Indigenous Territories’ (American Indian Culture and Research Journal,
2014) critically attend to state-​reinforced discourses of overlapping claims; his eth-
nography ‘Entanglements in Coast Salish Ancestral Territories’ in (Françoise Dussart
and Sylvie Poirier, eds) Entangled Territorialities (University of Toronto Press, 2017)
examines political ontology in reconciling land rights.
Bertram Turner holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Munich and
is Senior Researcher in the Department of Law & Anthropology at the Max Planck
Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He has conducted extended field
research in the Middle East and North Africa, Germany, and Canada, and has held
university teaching positions in Munich, Leipzig, and Halle. He has published widely
on the anthropology of law, science and technology, religion, conflict, development,
and resource extraction. Among his more recent publications are a chapter on the an-
thropology of property in (Michele Graziadei, ed.) Comparative Property Law: Global
Perspectives, (Edward Elgar, 2017) and a chapter (with Keebet von Benda-​Beckmann)
on the anthropological roots of global legal pluralism in (ed. Paul Schiff Berman) the
Oxford Handbook on Global Legal Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Melanie G. Wiber is an economic and legal anthropologist and Professor Emerita in
the Department of Anthropology, University of New Brunswick. She has published sev-
eral books and edited volumes on property rights, including Politics, Property and Law
in the Philippine Uplands (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1994), as well as a volume on
gender in human evolution imagery. Her work includes analysis of the property aspects
of irrigation rights, dairy quota and supply management, and of the Canadian fisheries.
For the past twenty years, Wiber has conducted participatory, action-​based research in
the fisheries of the Canadian Maritime provinces. Most recently, this research has fo-
cused on local ecological knowledge, ecological threats such as marine debris and oil
spills, and the impact of climate change on fishing communities.
Richard A. Wilson is Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Anthropology and
Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Intellectual Life at the University of
Connecticut School of Law. As author or editor of eleven books, he researches and writes
about international human rights, social media and online hate speech, and post-​conflict
xxviii   About the contributors

justice institutions such as truth and reconciliation commissions and international

criminal tribunals. He edited Human Rights, Culture and Context (Pluto Press, 1997), the
first edited book on the anthropology human rights, and authored an influential ethno-
graphic study of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, The Politics of
Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2001). His most
recent book is Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting International Speech Crimes (Cambridge
University Press, 2017). He is a member of the Hate Crimes Advisory Council of the
state of Connecticut and served as Chair of the State Advisory Committee to the US
Commission on Civil Rights (2009–​2014).
Olaf Zenker is Professor of Social Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-​
Wittenberg, Germany. Focusing on Southern Africa, Northern Ireland, and Germany,
his research has dealt with politico-​legal issues such as conflict and identity forma-
tions, plural normative orders, statehood, bureaucracy, the rule of law, modernity, in-
equality, and justice, as well as sociolinguistics and anthropological epistemologies. His
recent publications include (co-​edited with Gerhard Anders) Transition and Justice:
Negotiating the Terms of New Beginnings in Africa (Wiley-​Blackwell, 2015); (co-​edited
with Steffen Jensen) South African Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid’s Loose Ends in the
Postcolonial Era (Routledge, 2017); and (co-​edited with Markus Hoehne) The State and
the Paradox of Customary Law in Africa (Routledge, 2018).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“Pity our waiting list is so long. We must try to get your name
advanced, by hook or crook.”
While Hathorn departed to give his personal orders for the dinner,
Jimmy Potter drew apart to glance over a handful of cards, letters
and billets d’amour which a grave old club steward had handed to
him.
He critically selected two, the missives of “she who must be obeyed,”
and then carelessly slipped the fardel of the others into the oblivion
of his breast pocket.
He sat there, the ferret-eyed young millionaire, glowering after
Hathorn’s retreating form. “Pity to see Alida VanSittart wasted on that
cold human calculating machine! Fred is as indurated as a steel
chisel.”
The little child of Pactolus felt his tiny veins still tingling with the
exhalant magnetism of the budding heiress whom Hathorn had
selected as a second spoke in that wheel of fortune of which the
unconscious Jimmy was the main stay.
The aforesaid young patrician, Miss Alida, was “divinely tall” and of a
ravishing moonlight beauty, two elements of ensnaring witchery to
the dapper, blasé young Midas, whose little patent leathers had
pattered vainly along after the stride of that elastic young goddess.
The alert Vreeland grimly eyed the eager Jimmy Potter, and noted
the tell-tale quiver of the youth’s slim fingers as he fished out the two
“star” leaders of his evening mail.
“I would like just one night with that chap at poker, with no limit,”
gravely mused Vreeland, with an inspirational sigh. “He looks soft.”
While the parvenu “sized up” his man, he was aware of a hum of
murmured comment at a table near him.
Two men were following with their envious eyes the tall form of the
fortunate Hathorn—“the very rose and expectancy of the state,” as
he called his myrmidons around him.
“Lucky devil is Hathorn,” quoth A. “Saw him get out of the train to-
night with Mrs. Wharton Willoughby. Potter over there and a gang of
girls have been up at Lakemere. He still holds her fast.”
Quoth B: “He has a regular run of nigger luck. Elaine Willoughby is
the Queen of the Street. Her account must be worth a cool hundred
thousand a year to the firm. And here drops in to him, the whole
VanSittart fortune, a cool ten millions.”
Vreeland started as A rejoined moodily: “I had hoped that some
other fellow might have a chance to make the running at Lakemere,
now that Hathorn is rangé; but it really seems to be ‘a petit ménage à
trois’ so far.”
And B, thereat, enviously growled: “He ought to cling to the generous
woman who made him. I always thought Hathorn would finally marry
her. She trusts him with her chief account, the —— deals.” Vreeland
cursed the caution which cost him that one keyword “but, there’s a
mystery.”
It was with a wolfish hunger for “more sweetness and light” that the
unmoved Vreeland deftly arose and followed his host and Potter to a
fair upper chamber of that narrow-chested corner club house on Fifth
Avenue in the thirties, at whose critic-infested windows both Miss
Patricia and Miss Anonyma “give a side glance and look down.”
The royal road to fortune which had led the ambitious Hathorn “on
the heights” seemed to be clear of mist now to his hypocritical visitor.
Was there room for another chariot in the race? The familiar sprite
was busy with daring suggestions.
If a rich woman—not of an age très tendre—had made one man,
some other woman of that ilk might be waiting with a willing heart in
the babel of Gotham for the shapely young Lochinvar come out o’
the West.
The fires of hope leaped through his veins.
As they seated themselves to the enjoyment of that particular clear
turtle soup which is justly the pride of the club chef, both host and
guest were adroitly playing at cross-purposes.
Hathorn, with a secret avidity entirely New Yorkish, determined to
find out all the details of Vreeland’s financial windfall.
He had a vague idea that the outlandish wilds of Montana were
stuffed with copper mines, gold ledges, silver leads, cattle ranches,
and “all sorts of things that might be gotten hold of,” i. e., other
people’s money.
And if this placid and lamb-like blonde guest had “dropped into a
good thing,” then by a judicious use of a regulated social hospitality,
Hathorn now proposed to “drop into that same good thing.”
An uneasy fever seems to burn in a New York man’s blood from the
moment when he knows his neighbor to have an unprotected penny.
The keen-eyed Vreeland minutely examined his old chum’s “get-up,”
and quickly decided that he would closely copy this easily graceful
“glass of fashion and mould of form.”
He had already resolved that he would also try to make a “run in” at
Lakemere, if the cards came his way.
“I could always give Fred ten points at billiards and twenty with the
women, and then do him every time,” mused Vreeland. “He only
plays a sure-thing game.”
Vreeland’s own motto had always been “De l’audace! Toujours de
l’audace!” and in fact, the root of his quarrel with his own cowardly
father had been the sniveling, self-deprecatory caution of that “Old-
man-afraid-of-his-record.”
The little dinner was “très-soigné,” for Mr. Fred Hathorn did
everything “decently and in order,” and it calmly proceeded to the
gastronomic delight of a pleasure-loving man who had long nibbled
at jerked elk and biscuits à la Mike Muldoon.
The wines, with their soft suggestion and insinuating succession,
soon led them up to the point where Fred felt that he “had his man
about right.”
The shame-faced Potter, with his mandatory billets from “She,”
burning under his waistcoat, soon mumbled several iron-clad
excuses of unnecessary mendacity about “seeing a man,” and then
gladly escaped, hustling himself into the hack with all the fond
expectancy of a man who bought quite unnecessary diamond
necklaces loyally and cheerfully for that queen of bright eyes, Miss
Dickie Doubleday of the Casino.
When the old college comrades were left alone, even the shaven
servitor having fled, over the cigars of the incomparable Bock & Co.,
the two young men drifted into a considerable rapprochement.
The old friendly days came back. Château Yquem, Pontèt Canet,
fine Burgundy, and Pommery Sec have often mended many a torn
thread in the web of friendship, as well as patched up the little rift in
the Lute of Love. Your sweet devil-born spirit of champagne always
stands smiling at the crossroads of life.

“And, both reviewed the olden past—

Full many a friend, in battle slain,
And all the war that each had known,
Rose o’er them once again.”

The dinner was a “howling success” from the varying points of view
of each sly schemer and his would-be dupe.
Hathorn smiled knowingly when Vreeland carelessly remarked that
he was not familiar with the dry details of Montana investments.
“I leave all that drudgery to my lawyers,” he airily remarked, with all
the nerve of a Napoleon Ives.
“I must try and work his account in our direction,” mused the ardent
devotee of business, while Vreeland gracefully bowed his thanks,
when Hathorn rejoined:
“Mrs. Willoughby? Yes. A wonderful woman. Prettiest place at
Irvington. She entertains a great deal. I’ll ask her if I may present
you. She’s probably the heaviest operator on the Street of all our rich
women.”
It was long after midnight when the two chums separated.
Their strange life orbits had intersected for the first time since they
sang “Lauriger Horatius” together in an honest, youthful chorus.
Mr. Harold Vreeland now felt intuitively that his “bluff” was a good
one. He had always battled skillfully enough in the preliminary
skirmishes of his conflict with the world, but he felt that the scene of
action had been poorly chosen.
Hard-hearted and pitiless, he cursed the memory of his corrupt and
inefficient father, as he directed his lonely steps to the “Waldorf,” to
register his name as a permanent guest.
His heart beat no throb warmer in acknowledgment of the seven
thousand dollars’ windfall which was to bring his star up from an
obscure western declination to a brilliant eastern right ascension.
He delivered his luggage checks to the night clerk of New York’s
greatest hotel, and proudly inscribed himself as a member of the
“swell mob” filling that painted Vanity Fair.
A strange fire burned within his veins. He recalled Fred Hathorn’s
final semi-confidential remark: “Do you know anything of handling
stocks? If you do, we could put you up to a good thing or two on the
Street now.”
It was no lie. The glib story which had fallen easily from his lips of the
six-months’ exciting experience in which he acted as dummy cashier
for a San Francisco kite-flying “Big Board” firm of brokers during a
sporadic revival of the “Comstock craze.”
He had learned then how to “wipe out a margin” as deftly as the
veriest scamp who ever signed a fraudulent “statement” for reckless
man or sly, insinuating woman.
He had artfully led Fred Hathorn on to describe the unique position
of Mrs. Elaine Willoughby among the bravest of the swim. The New
Yorker was over-eager in his fencing, and so Vreeland easily
gathered him in.
Lighting a cigar, he strolled along the silent Fifth Avenue, arranging
with quick decision his preliminary maneuvers.
“This lovely woman who has built up Hathorn must surely have a
vacancy in her heart at present, vice Hathorn, ‘transferred for
promotion’ to head the VanSittart millions.”
“It’s a good play to come in between them now. He will never
suspect my game, but I’ll block his little scheme some way, unless
he carries me along upward. He evidently wishes to be rid of the old
rapprochement now, and yet not lose her stock business. By Jove! I
would like to cut in there.”
He strolled along toward the “Circassia,” that pink pearl of all
sumptuous apartment palaces, and eagerly reconnoitered the
superb citadel of Elaine Willoughby’s social fortifications.
“Lakemere, a dream of beauty,” he murmured. “I’ll soon get into that
same gilded circle, and work the whole set for all they are worth.”
He plumed himself upon the approving glance of the beautiful brown
eyes of the mistress of Lakemere as she had swept by on Fred
Hathorn’s arm.
“She accepted my bow as an evident homage to her own queenly
self,” mused Vreeland, who was no dabster at reading the ways of
the mutable woman heart.
“Yes, she is my first play. I must burn my ships and now go boldly in
for ‘High Life.’ I’ll risk it. Carlisle said: ‘There are twenty millions of
people in Britain—mostly fools.’ Among the gilded fools of Gotham,
some one easy mark must be waiting for me on general principles.
I’ll take the chances and play the queen for my whole stack of chips.”
He wandered homeward, after narrowly inspecting the “Circassia,”
and unconsciously attracting the attention of Daly, the Roundsman,
the bravest and cheeriest member of the Tenderloin police.
Lights still gleamed from a splendid second-floor apartment above
him, where a lovely woman, royal in her autumnal beauty, gazed out
at the night.
Elaine Willoughby sighed as she turned away. “If I had told Hathorn
all, he might have made me his wife. Alida—” Her face hardened as
she choked down a sob. “My God! if I only knew! I must have
Endicott renew his search.”
In some strange way, the handsome Western stranger returned to
haunt her disturbed mind. “He looks like a man brave, gallant, and
tender,” she sighed, as she forgot Hathorn, who, in his bachelor
apartments was now musing upon the ways and means to hold
Elaine Willoughby’s heart after he had wedded Miss Millions.
 CHAPTER II.

THE DRIFT OF A DAY IN NEW YORK CITY.

Sparkling lances of golden morning sunbeams broke and shivered

on the fretted golden roof of the Synagogue by Central Park’s
eastern wall of living green.
New York was astir once more, and the daily burden of life settled
down again upon myriads of galled shoulders. The rumbling trains
had rattled away the blue-bearded mechanic, the pale-faced clerk,
and the ferret-eyed anæmic shop girl to their daily “demnition grinds”
long before Elaine Willoughby opened her eyes, in the Circassia.
“A breeze of morning moved,” and down the Mall early pedestrians
wandered, while the bridle bits rang out merrily on the park cantering
paths.
Sedentary citizens had strolled along into the leafy shades for a
peep at a cherished book, or a glance at the horrible of horribles in
the “New York Whirl,” while the recumbent tramp shook himself and
hopefully scuttled forth from his grassy lair to search for vinous
refreshment and to craftily elude the inexorable “sparrow cop.”
New York City was awakened in the inverse order of rank, and the
passion play of Gotham was on once more.
The splintered lances danced over the fragrant God’s acres of the
great pleasure ground to the palace on Central Park west, and as
they were gaily reflected from a silver-framed Venetian mirror, they
recalled Mrs. Wharton Willoughby to that luxurious life of Gotham in
whose fierce splendors there is no rest.
For as burning a flame throbs in the heated maelstrom of Manhattan
as in any human eddy of the whole distracted globe.
The congestion of careworn faces had filled the town below Canal
Street with its battling disciples of Mammon long before
Mrs. Wharton Willoughby stepped into her brougham to seek the
counsels of the one man on earth whose integrity was her rock of
Gibraltar, Judge Hiram Endicott, her legal adviser and trustee.
For the silver-framed mirror had relentlessly reflected the traces left
by the vigil of the night before.
It was the morning after the storm, and no calm had yet soothed the
troubled soul of the woman whom thousands envied.
With a fine Gallic perception, Justine, the black-browed, slyest of
French maids, had remarked: “Madame n’ a pas bien dormi?” as she
arranged the filmy coffee service of Dresden eggshell.
Elaine Willoughby was sullen, but resolute, as she arranged the
details of her morning interview by the Ariel magic of her private
telephone.
The ceaseless activity of the Street compelled the veiled “queen” to
have her own “intelligence department” adjoining her boudoir, a nook
with its special wires leading to Hiram Endicott’s office and even to
his sober Park Avenue home, and its talking wire also extended to
the private office of Frederick Hathorn, Esq., of Hathorn and Potter,
and another handy wire leading to the lair where the cashier of the
Chemical Bank scanned the ebb and flow of Mrs. Elaine
Willoughby’s fortune.
A stock ticker and dial telegraph, binding the central office of the
Western Union to the Circassia, were always stumbling blocks to the
insidious Justine, who earned a vicious golden wage in piping off
every movement of the queen to the adroit Fred Hathorn.
On this particular morning, Hathorn was disturbed at heart as he
answered Justine’s spying warning of Mrs. Willoughby’s early
departure for her downtown coign of vantage—that room in Judge
Endicott’s offices in the Hanover Bank building, which was terra
incognita even to him. The corner of Pine and Nassau was an
Ehrenbreitstein.
For Hathorn’s acutest schemes had never yet given him the open
sesame to the room adjoining Hiram Endicott’s study bearing the
simple inscription “Office Willoughby Estate.”
There, Madame Elaine was safe, even from him.
He grumbled: “I don’t half like the way Elaine eyed Alida VanSittart
yesterday. There was a storm signal in my lady’s glances. If she
should draw away her account—”
He shuddered, for he was well overdrawn in his personal relations
with Mr. Jimmy Potter, who had just meekly slunk into his office, with
quivering nerves and much pink-eyed indications of the aftermath of
“a cosy little evening at Miss Dickie Doubleday’s.”
“I must keep her well in hand till I pull off the marriage. Sugar is on
the jump, too. There’s a half million if I follow her sure lead.
“By God! I would give ten years of my life to know who posts her in
that saccharine article of prime necessity. I will give her something to
interest her. Yes; the very thing! I’ll run in Hod Vreeland there.
“He is a new face, and she may forget to harry Alida in the new
man’s initiation at Lakemere. And I’ll go up and see her this
afternoon myself.”
When he had telephoned his carefully-worded message to Justine,
to be delivered to Mrs. Willoughby on her return, he ordered a basket
of orchids to precede his call at the Circassia, and then, with a fine
after-thought, telegraphed “Mr. Harold Vreeland, Hotel Waldorf,” to
await his call on important business after dinner.
“If I am going to use Vreeland, I may as well put him into play right
now,” cheerfully mused Hathorn, as he lit a Prince of Wales cigarette.
“I can pay that devil Justine a bit extra to watch Hod Vreeland’s little
game with Elaine.
“A bit of healthy flirtation may cause her to forget Alida shining her
down.
“Whirlwind speculator as she is, the Willoughby is one of Eve’s
family, after all. ‘But yet a woman!’ I wonder if—”
His reverie was cut off by the entrance of Mr. Jimmy Potter, who
calmly remarked: “Sugar is going hellward! You had better get out
and see about where we will land!”
Mr. Fred Hathorn had unwittingly passed one of the cross-roads of
life and a knowledge of his proposed actions would have been Balm
of Gilead to the anxious soul of Harold Vreeland, who was busily
engaged with the great tailor, Bell—manufacturer of gentlemen à la
mode.
The crafty Vreeland’s heart would have bounded had he realized
how true was the debonnair Jimmy Potter’s one golden maxim. “Hold
on quietly, and what you want will come around to you!”
The arched doors of the Circassia, the superb gateways of
Lakemere were being slowly swung for him, by the scheming man
who cunningly proposed to divert the Montana bonanza into the
coffers of Hathorn and Potter.
Mr. Potter, in his pink-eyed awakening from a night’s folly, was now
standing at the bar of the Savarin, gloomily reflecting upon certain
rashnesses of his own on the preceding evening.
These little extravaganzas, greatly to the profit and delight of Miss
Dickie Doubleday, had been all unsolicited by that sinewy-hearted
young beauty.
“The biggest fool in the world is the man who fools himself!” sadly
ejaculated Potter, as he shed his burden of care with the half dollar
dropped for a “high ball.”
He crept back to watch Fred Hathorn battling in the Sugar pit, with all
the admiration of a fainéant for an energetic man.
“Great fellow, Fred!” proudly reflected Mr. Jimmy, with one last
wormwood pang for the robbery of that young Diana, Alida
VanSittart.
“She outclasses him—ranks him—clean out of sight!” sadly mourned
Potter. “Now, if I was only clear of the Doubleday, I might—”
But, an aching head cut short his half-formed determination.
“I suppose that she is like all the others!” sighed Potter.
“These New York girls’ hearts are like a ball of string, unwind the
thing—and—there’s nothing left!”
Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, on her way down town, had stolen another
glimpse at her own disturbed face. The crise des nerfs had clearly
brought out to her the presaged passing of her beauty.
The little hand glass of the brougham told her, with brutal
abruptness, that the face she was gravely studying must pale before
the moonlight radiance of Alida VanSittart.
Face to face with her own sorrow, she saw the truth at last. Was it
envy of the nymph-like girl or a dull hatred of Hathorn, for his cold
ingratitude, which racked her heart?
“Perhaps, if I had told him all,” she murmured, “I will find out the lost
link of my life yet, and there must be a man somewhere who would
prove worthy of a woman’s whole confidence.
“One who could wander in le Jardin Secret, by my side!”
As she studied her own face, with a needless self-deprecation, there
came back to her the handsome Western stranger.
“Perhaps,” she dreamily said, as her mind wandered away to the
great dim Sierras, “uplifting their minarets of snow,” “he may have
caught their majestic secret of truth and lofty freedom.”
And—she, too, drifted on to a cross-road of life.
Elaine Willoughby had finished her inspection of the counterfeit
presentment afforded by the little mirror.
Though matters of both head and heart claimed all the exercise of
her mental powers on this morning, she was lost in a vexing
comparison of her own personal charms with those of Alida
VanSittart.
The lady had never fathomed the reason why the wise Thales had
formulated his priceless proverb of three words into the cramped
diction, “Man! Know Thyself!”
The antique sage wisely refrained from saying, “Woman! Know
Thyself!” for, far beyond the clouds wrapping the misty ruins of
Greece, Rome and the Nile, the woman of yesterday never had been
the woman of to-day, nor her chameleon substitute of to-morrow.
The only thing unvarying in womanhood, is its infinite emotional
variety. Not one in a million of that charming sex has ever mastered
the secret of their strange enigmas of varying loves, and the one
only anchored feeling of motherhood.
The divine Shakespeare’s words, “’Tis brief! Aye—as woman’s love!”
are supplemented by the great-hearted Mrs. Browning’s feminine
lines, “Yes! I answered you last night. No! this morning, sir, I say!”
Elaine Willoughby did not know herself. She resolutely put away the
reason why she ignored all the hawk-eyed young Gibson beauties of
Irvington, Tarrytown, and Ardsley, to nourish a resentment alone
against that slim Diana, Alida VanSittart.
Woman of the world, throned upon a golden pedestal of wealth—
mistress of secrets that would shake the financial world—she had
also enjoyed the homage of men long enough to know every one of
her own good points.
There had been hours of triumph, too. For, after all, a woman’s heart
beat behind the silken armor of her Worth robes.
Still in the bloom of a meridian beauty, no one in Gotham knew but
Hiram Endicott that her years were thirty-seven.
Her brunette loveliness of face was accentuated by the molded
symmetry of her Venus de Milo form.
Men knew her only as the childless widowed chatelaine of
Lakemere, the inheritor of a vast fortune hazily dating from Colorado.
A few cold words from that oracle, Judge Hiram Endicott, had
dispelled any doubts as to the authenticity of the late Wharton
Willoughby.
The checks of the woman whom all had failed to win were
considered among the cognoscenti as gilt-edged as Treasury
Certificates.
The grave glances of her sole attorney and trustee were also a no
thoroughfare to prying gossipers, and it was only by a long series of
stealthy financial sleuth work that the financial world discovered both
“sugar” and “oil” to be as granite buttresses to the unshaken pyramid
of her solid wealth. On the Street she was a whirlwind operator—with
“inside tips!”
As the brougham swung along through Pine Street, Mrs. Willoughby
caught a single glimpse of Fred Hathorn, eager-eyed, and hurrying
to the Stock Exchange.
The man of thirty-five had risen to be a clubman—a yachtsman of
renown—a man of settled fortune—and a social lion, too, in the five
years since she had opened the gates of her heart to admit the
handsome struggling youth, then paddling feebly in Wall Street’s
foaming breakers.
She leaned back with a sigh. Hathorn’s sudden apparition had
opened her eyes to the reason of her dull hatred of the millionaire
fiancée.
“He is the reason why I hate that girl,” she murmured, with misty
lashes, and an old saw came back to her.
“It is hard to look out on a lover’s happiness through another man’s
eyes!”
In the gilded throng at Lakemere, the proprietary endearments of
Frederick Hathorn had galled her stormy soul. She knew not that the
parvenu broker was only publicly sealing, beyond a doubt, the
projected union which would make him the equal in capitalistic
reserve of that easy-going Son of Fortune, Potter, to whom all things
came around—even Miss Dickie Doubleday’s bills.
A ray of light lit up her darkened heart.
“Alida is innocent of wrecking my happiness. She could know
nothing. For I have been silent! And if I held the ladder, can I blame
him for climbing? He needs me no longer.
“I have been only a means to an end. Alida will be the last. And then,
Frederick Hathorn, Esquire, is safely in the swim!”
A sudden conviction of the uselessness of her affectation of a semi-
maternal interest in the fortunes of the hardened man of thirty-five
told her that she had left all the doors open to him.
For there was that in her own life, dating back to her girlhood, which
she had never even revealed to her half-lover protégé.
With her rich womanly nature sorely shaken, her tender dark eyes
drooping, she now owned to the hope, now fled forever, that Hathorn
would light the beacon of love in her lonely heart. “I have not trusted
him,” she murmured. “He owes me nothing, nothing but gratitude.”
Too late, she saw that mere gratitude does not kindle into love, and a
sense of her own lack of frankness sealed her accusing lips.
“I can not blame Hathorn!” she murmured. “It is my own fault. I told
him the truth, but—not the whole truth!”
Still, she suffered from the shattering of flattering hopes long secretly
cherished, and saw now the marriage of her financial éleve as a
future bar to the confidential relations which had linked him to her
fortunes with golden chains.
“They will go on and play the game of life brilliantly without me—
these two, whom I have unwittingly brought together. I will go on
alone—now—to the end—unless I can find the lost thread.
“Endicott must reopen the search! I will spend a half million—and—
that other heart shall know mine!” She was lost in the memories of a
buried past.
As she entered the vestibule of the office building, a grave manly
voice aroused her.
“I thought that you should know this,” whispered Hugh Conyers, of
the New York Clarion. “It has just come over the wires from
Washington.
“I was going up to tell the Judge, and have him send for you. You will
have a busy day.”
The startled woman read a slip which was the burden of the lightning
Ariel which had set “Sugar soaring hellward” in the classic diction of
James Potter, Esq.
“Hugh!” gasped the Queen of the Street, as she drew him into a dark
corner, “can I never reward you for your loyalty? Is there nothing I
can do for you?”
The Knight of the Pen laughed gaily, as he pocketed the yellow slip.
“Not now! Lady Mine! You paid in advance when you saved Sara’s
life by sending her away to Algiers! I’m off to the office. When you
can give two respectably poor people an evening, send for us, that’s
all—but, we want you all to ourselves!
“If there is anything more, I will come around. Shall I tell this to
Hathorn?” His eyes were fixed eagerly upon her.
There was a slight ring of hardness in her voice, as she hastily said:
“Not a word to him, in future. He is going to marry—and—go away
for a time. I will handle this line alone—after this—only report to the
Judge. He is my Rock of Gibraltar.”
She disappeared in the elevator with a hard little laugh. For she was
trying to make light of the blow which had told upon her lonely heart.
The newspaper man edged his way up Nassau Street in a brown
study.
“Coming events cast their shadows before,” he muttered. “I wonder if
she will ever know? Some day, perhaps.”
Darting messenger boys and disgruntled pedestrians eyed wrathfully
the high-browed man of forty, who strode along with his gray eyes
fixed on vacancy.
One or two “business women” noted the clean-cut, soldierly features,
the well-shaped head, with all the intellectual stamp of old Amherst,
brightened by the fierce intellectual rivalry of the nervous New York
press.
Artist, athlete, and thinker, Hugh Conyers had hewed his upward
way through the press of bread winners out into the open, and, still
sweet-hearted and sincere, he steadily eyed without truckling, New
York’s golden luxury, and saw, with a living sympathy, the pathetic
tragedies of the side eddies of Gotham’s stiller waters.
From his cheery den, where his sister Sara Conyers’ flowers of art
bloomed, the writer looked out unmoved upon the Walpurgis nights
of winter society—the mad battles of Wall Street—and the shabby
abandon of New York City’s go-as-you-please summer life.
It was only in his faraway summer camp, by the cheery fire, under
the friendly stars, or out on the dreaming northern lakes, floating in
his beloved birch canoe, that he opened his proud heart to nature—
and then, perchance, murmured in his sleep—a name which had
haunted his slumbers long.
“So! It’s all over between them!” mused Hugh, as he was swallowed
up in a lair of clanking presses and toiling penmen. “Mr. Fred
Hathorn has arrived. God help his wife to be! The Belgian granite
paving block is as tender as that golden youth’s heart.”
He well knew that the artful protégé had only used the generous
woman’s volunteered bounty of the past—“as means to an end.”
“Elaine has simply coined her golden heart for that smart cad!” he
sighed, as he grasped a blunted spear of a pencil to dash off an
editorial upon “German Influence in the South Seas.”
In her guarded downtown office, Mrs. Elaine Willoughby resolutely
put aside the one subject now nearest her heart, to summon, by
signal, the fortunate man who was fast slipping out of her life.
The startled Queen of the Street gave but ten minutes’ time to the
consideration of the sudden change in the affairs of a giant syndicate
which used two hundred millions of dollars in swaying the world of
commercial slaves at its feet.
A warning word from Hiram Endicott’s nephew (his sole confidant)
told her that her lawyer-trustee had just been summoned, privately,
to meet the inscrutable Chief of the Syndicate.
With keen acumen, she reviewed the hostile probing of a mighty
Senate, into the Sealed Book of the great Trust’s affairs.
From her own safe, she then extracted a memorandum book and
grimly smiled, as she noted a date—May 17, 1884.
She quickly read over two cipher letters, dated “Arlington Hotel,
Washington, D.C.,” which had been silently handed her by Endicott’s
only relative, and murmured, “Can it be that the Standard Oil people
are going to quietly buy in and wager their vast fortunes on the
double event?
“Hiram will know—and—what he knows we will keep to ourselves!”
A sense of absolute safety possessed her when she reflected that
the sole depositary of her life secrets—the one man au courant with
her giant speculations was a childless widower and had passed the
age when passions’ fires glow—and was, moreover, rich beyond all
need of future acquisition.
Pride kept Hiram Endicott still in the ranks of his profession, while
the acquired taste of money-making filled up the long days darkened
by the loss of wife and daughter.
When Hathorn, replying to her summons with an anxious brow,
entered the room where the beautiful architect of his fortunes
awaited him, he found a strange serenity brooding upon her face.
With a brief greeting, he plunged in media res. His report was quickly
made.
The unmoved listener quietly remarked, “Hold my account out of all
future deals in Sugar. Do nothing whatever. I may go away for a few
weeks. I do not care for this little flurry. I will stand out—and—the
Judge will keep that line safe.”
The quiet decision of Elaine Willoughby’s orders gave the quietus to
the young man’s eager plans for a great coup.
Watching her craftily from the corners of his eyes, he lightly turned to
the proposed visit of that interesting Montana capitalist, Harold
Vreeland.
“Bring him to see me, by all means!” the Lady of Lakemere cordially
said. “He seems to have caught a bit of the breeziness of the pines.”
And then, when Hiram Endicott briskly entered, Mr. Frederick
Hathorn fled away to the renewed struggles of the Exchange.
The quondam “only broker” was, however, not deceived. He raced
on through the excited street to cover the firm’s large line of the
rapidly advancing stock, and reasoned quickly as he went.
In his heart there was the conviction of a coming change in the
generous heart which had been so long open to him.
“Elaine is a deep one,” he wrathfully mused. “She is either flying too
high for me to follow in this—or else, she is ‘moving in a mysterious
way her wonders to perform.’”
He knew her nature too well to question her explicit orders.
The nerve of a duelist, the honor of a caballèro, the courage of a
plumed knight—all these were her attributes, and he was not mad
enough to doubt that she knew her own mind.
The “moaning of the sea of change” oppressed him. “She has got
out beyond me,” he grumbled, and then, with all the experience born
of his social life “above board” and “under the rose,” he failed to
remember any case wherein a loving woman had gone madly wild in
approval of a man’s devotion to another daughter of Eve.
“I was a fool to take Alida up there to Lakemere, and fret my best
customer with the ‘billing and cooing’ act! It was a bad play—and—
yet, the break had to come!”
He swore a deep oath that he would, when married, hold Alida
VanSittart well in hand, and still cling to the desirable business of the
woman who had made his fortune.
“Here’s Vreeland,” he hopefully planned. “Just the fellow! Ardent,
young, an interesting devil, and, rich. He will help to fill up the
measure of her lonely days—and, his game can never cross my
own.
“He’s a mighty presentable fellow, too, and I can perhaps strengthen
my hold on her through him.”
A cautionary resolve to keep the handsome Western traveler away
from Miss Alida VanSittart was born of the slight uneasiness caused
by the gilded Potter’s attentions to the tall young nymph of the court
of Croesus. “She is my ‘sine qua!’” he smiled. “No fooling around
there!”
It was four o’clock before the busy Hathorn could get the nose of his
financial bark steered safely over the saccharine breakers of the
Sugar market.
And, still, a growing excitement filled the aspiring young banker’s
veins.