Reckoning with Law in Excess

Reckoning with Law in Excess offers a ground-breaking approach to understanding the relationship between law and social and political transformation in a changing and uncertain world. The book’s authors examine a wide range of case studies in which social movements pursue justice and social change within, against, and beyond the law. The interdisciplinary research at the heart of the volume reveals patterns in the ways in which law and legality are invested with heightened importance during certain historical moments, a process of over-loading that most often gives way to disenchantment with the ultimate limits of law. In reflecting critically and synthetically on these complicated dialectics of reckoning with law, the book shines a light on one of the most important, and consequential, dynamics in an era of climate crisis, rising populism across the political spectrum, and social conflict. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology (LACS) at the University of Lausanne. One of the pioneers in the anthropology of human rights, he is the author or editor of a number of books on law, human rights, and justice, including Reinventing Human Rights (2022).

Olaf Zenker is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His research deals with political and legal issues such as statehood, bureaucracy, the rule of law, normative pluralities, inequality and justice. His latest book publications include Beyond Expropriation Without Compensation: Law, Land Reform and Redistributive Justice in South Africa (2024).