British Museum tour

I constructed a tour of Rule of Law Treasures at the British Museum for the Folke Bernadotte Academy Rule of Law Research Group meeting on the theme of 'Addicted to Law?' co-hosted by Chandra Lekha Sriram and I in April 2013 at SOAS, University of London. Thanks to the Folke Bernadotte Academy for funding.

The tour is based on the British Museum-BBC History of the World in 100 Objects project and the accompanying volume by Neil MacGregor.

For best results listen to each linked podcast episode, listening out for the relevant theme. Then print out the guide and visit each object in the British Museum--it should take about an hour. Alternatively, you can do it all virtually.

The tour is part of the Legal Treasures Tours series.

1. Ife Head Room 25 (Level -1)

Theme: Rule of law within.
Origins: Wunmonije Compound, Ife, Nigeria, 1300s – early 1400s AD.
Reading: B Davidson West Africa before the Colonial Era

2. Pillar of Ashoka Room 33 (Level 1)

Theme: Spreading the word.
Origins: Uttar Pradesh (probably), India, about 238 BC
Reading: N A Nikam and R Mckeon Edicts of Asoka

3. Standard of Ur Room 56 (Level 3)

Theme: Urban economy and security.

Origins: Ur, southern Iraq, about 2600-2400 BC
Reading: N Postgate Early Mesopotamia: Society and economy at the dawn of history

4. Ming bank note Room 68 (Level 3)

Theme: Rule by faith.
Origins: China, AD 1375
Reading: R Huang Taxation and Government Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China

5. Suffragette-defaced coin Room 68 (Level 3)

Theme: Subverting the rule.
Origins: United Kingdom, AD 1903
Reading: M Phillips The Ascent of Woman

Publications

 
Articles

Perry-Kessaris A (forthcoming 2016) ‘The econo-socio-legal construction of indicator legitimacy’ International Journal of Law in Context

Perry-Kessaris A (forthcoming 2016) ‘Collecting value/valuing collecting’ 4:1 London Review of International Law special Issue on value.

Perry-Kessaris A (2015) ‘Approaching the econo-socio-legal’ 11:16 Annual Review of Law & Social Science 1-18

Perry-Kessaris A (2014) ‘The case for a visualized economic sociology of legal development’ 67 Current Legal Problems 169-98 [SLSA Article Prize. 1074 full text/pdf downloads]

Perry-Kessaris A (2013) ‘Anemos-ity, apatheia, enthousiasmos: An economic sociology of law and wind farm development in Cyprus’ 40:1 Journal of Law & Society Special Issue Towards an Economic Sociology of Law 68-91

Perry-Kessaris A (2011) ‘Reading the story of law and embeddedness through a community lens: A Polanyi-meets-Cotterrell economic sociology of law?’ 62:4 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly Special Issue on Socializing Economic Relationships 401-13

Perry-Kessaris A (2011) ‘Prepare your indicators: Economics imperialism on the shores of law and development’ 7:4 International Journal of Law in Context 401-21.

Cohen E, Fandl KJ, Perry-Kessaris A & Taylor VL (2011) ‘Truth and consequences in rule of law: Inferences, attribution and evaluation’ 3:1 The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law

Perry-Kessaris A (2008) ‘Recycle, reduce and reflect: Information overload and knowledge deficit in the field of foreign investment and the law’ S35(1) Journal of Law & Society Special Issue on Law’s reality: Empirical research on law 67-75

Perry-Kessaris A (2004) ‘Use, abuse and avoidance: Foreign investors and the legal system in Bangalore’ 12:2 Asia Pacific Law Review 161-89

Perry-Kessaris A (2003) ‘Finding and facing facts about legal systems and FDI in South Asia’ 23:4 Legal Studies 649-89 [SLSA Article Prize]

Perry A J (2002) ‘Multinational enterprises, international economic organisations and convergence among legal systems’ 2 Non State Actors & International Law 23-39

Perry A J (2002) ‘The relationship between legal systems and economic development: Integrating economic and cultural approaches’ 29:2 Journal of Law & Society 282-307

Perry A J (2000) ‘An ideal legal system for attracting foreign direct investment? Some theory and reality’ 15:6 American University International Law Review 1627-57

Perry A J (2000) ‘Effective legal systems and foreign direct investment: In search of the evidence’ 49 ICLQ 779-99 [Reprinted Beveridge F (2005) Globalization & International Investment Ashgate]

Authored books

Perry-Kessaris A (2008) Global Business, Local Law: The Indian legal system as a communal resource in foreign investment relations Ashgate [Reviewed 45: 2 Law & Society Review 505-9]

Perry A J (2001) Legal Systems as a Determinant of FDI: Lessons from Sri Lanka Kluwer [Reviewed 10:2 Asia Pacific Law Review 211-8 and Revue générale de droit international public]

Edited books & special issues

Ashiagbor D, Kotiswaran P & Perry-Kessaris A eds (2014) 65:3 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly Special Issue on Continuing towards an economic sociology of law

Perry-Kessaris, A & T Xu eds (2013) 64:3 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly Special Issue on Legal Appropriation: Taking of and by law

Ashiagbor D, Kotiswaran P & Perry-Kessaris A eds (2013) 40:1 Journal of Law & Society Special Issue on Towards an Economic Sociology of Law [and in book form with Wiley Blackwell]

Perry-Kessaris A ed (2013) Socio-Legal Approaches to International Economic Law: Text, context, subtext Routledge [Reviewed 17 Journal of International Economic Law 867 and 15 J. World Investment & Trade 1109]

Perry-Kessaris A ed (2010) Law in Pursuit of Development: Principles into practice? Routledge [Hardback 2009. Mentioned in World Bank’s JurEx <go.worldbank.org/5C40968QW0%3E>]

Perry-Kessaris A & Hatchard J eds (2003) Law and Development in the 21st Century: Facing complexity Cavendish.

Chapters

Perry-Kessaris A (forthcoming 2016) ‘Transnational law and development’ in Zumbansen P Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law OUP

Perry-Kessaris A (2014) 'Discovering the econo-socio-legal through a communal lens' in Schiff D & Nobel R eds. Law, Society and Community: Socio-legal essays in honour of Roger Cotterrell Ashgate

Perry-Kessaris A (2013) ‘What does it mean to take a socio-legal approach to international economic law?’ in Perry-Kessaris A ed Socio-Legal Approaches to International Economic Law: Text, context, subtext Routledge

Perry-Kessaris A (2010) ‘Corporate liability for environmental harm’ in Fitzmaurice M and Ong D eds. Research Handbook on International Environmental Law Edward Elgar

Perry-Kessaris A (2009) ‘Enriching the World Bank’s vision of national legal systems and foreign direct investment’ in Berling P, Ederlov J & Taylor VL eds (2009) Rule of Law Promotion: global perspectives, local applications Iustus Forlag 271-86

Perry-Kessaris A (2007) ‘Gateways to environmental justice in India’s garden city: Local solutions to global challenges’ in Harding A ed Access to Environmental Justice: A comparative study Brill

Perry-Kessaris A (2003) ‘Decision making in a regulatory environment: Representing the butterfly’ in Hatchard H & Perry-Kessaris A eds Law and Development in the 21st Century: Facing complexity Cavendish

Perry A J (2000) ‘Sustainable gateways to environmental justice’ in Pugh C ed Sustainable Cities in Developing Countries Earthscan

Perry A J (1999) ‘International economic organisations and the modern law and development movement’ in Seidman A, Seidman R & Wälde T eds Making Development Work Kluwer [Cited in (2006) World Bank Legal Review: Law, Equity and Development v II]

Perry A J (1998) ‘Law and urban change in an Indian city’ in Fernandes E and Varley A eds Illegal Cities: Law and urban change in developing countries Zed Books

Other

Perry-Kessaris A (2015) ‘Communicating law through graphic design’. Poster. SLSA Annual Conference Warwick

Perry-Kessaris A (2015) ‘Graphic legal activism’ STIR Spring 2015 Issue/09 [Community oriented reader-funded publication]

Perry-Kessaris A (2013) ‘Three-to-one: Approaching the econo-socio-legal’ Poster. LSE Research Festival 2013: Exploring research stories through visual images

Perry-Kessaris A (2011) ‘Indications of India’s investment climate: Who cares?’ East Asia Forum Quarterly [Opinion & analysis publication aimed at policy makers; 30K subscribers]

Econo-socio-legal (c) Amanda Perry-Kessaris 2013

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Documentaries

Capital Justice

China Shaking the World

Debtocracy

The Corporation

The Cotton Wars

 

Mini guides

Actor Network Theory in plain English

Empirical research methods workshops

Introduction to sociology

What is agent based social simulation? 

Evaluating social programmes

WTO dispute settlement training module

Interactive: stash your cash

Podcast series

All in the Mind

• Nudge

Beyond Belief

• The Protestant work ethic

Conversations in Law and Society

• Stewart Macaulay

Crossing Continents

• Delhi

Cybernorms and Sociology of Law

• Roger Cotterrell

Economist multimedia

• Investing in Africa 
• Doing business in Hong Kong

Econtalk

• Munger on the nature of the firm
• Satz on markets
• Roberts on Smith, Ricardo, and trade
• Rubinstein on game theory and behavioral economics 

File on Four

• Are bribe firms escaping justice?
• Europe's Missing Millions 

In Our Time

• The Opium Wars
• Ibn Khaldun

Law in Action

• Bribery reform in UK
• 2011 riots
• Public inquiries 

National Archives

• The will forgeries: a forgotten sensation 
• Identity and identity theft
• The real Little Dorrit: Charles Dickens and the debtors’ prison
• Authority, legitimacy and orthodoxy: the accession of Henry V in 1413 
• An embarrassing question: opium, Britain and China 1856-1860
• Keeping it in the family: professional dynasties in 19th century England 

Planet Money

• Cotton wars
• Pietra Rivoli's t-shirt travels 
• After the crisis: An economist reconsiders cappuccino
• Hayek v Keynes
• Inside Washington's money machine 
• Tallying up the pelican bill
• What your $3,000 bought in Haiti
• Making Christmas more joyful, and more efficient
• Pop quiz: how do you stop sea captains from killing their passengers?
• Lighthouses, autopsies and the Federal budget
• Money buys happiness 

Thinking Allowed

• Prabha Kotiswaran on Indian sex workers

This American Life

• The giant pool of money
• The watchmen
• The invention of money
• Trends with benefits
• I'm from the private sector and I'm here to help
• Alien experiment

More or Less

• Debt: A European Odyssey

Justice Talking

• Private property, public interest
• FairTrade
• Free trade
• Family farms and agricultural subsidies
• The Business of Race: Affirmative action in government contracting  

Radio 4 Archive on 4

• Schumacher's big society

Reith Lectures

• Michael Sandel on markets and morals
• Patricia Williams on the genealogy of race

TED Talks

• Rosling on Asia’s Rise: How and When?

The Joy of Stats

• Hans Rosling's 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes

Unreliable Evidence

• Law and protest

Working with a designer

Graphic designer Sarah Schrauwen worked with enthusiasm and responsiveness to create a visualisation of actors, interactions, regimes and rationalities for ‘Anemos-ity, apatheia, enthousiasmos: An economic sociology of law and wind farm development in Cyprus’-- my contribution to a workshop on Towards an Economic Sociology of Law.

Reading group

Diamond Ashiagbor and I began an Economic Sociology of Law reading group at SOAS in early 2011 which continues to run. It is an informal gathering of faculty and students from across disciplines and institutions who are interested in the idea of an economic sociology of law—that is, the use of sociological approaches (empirical, normative, analytical) to investigate relationships between legal and economic phenomena.
 
For forthcoming meetings and instructions on how to join, see the Reading Group webpage. A record of meetings held to summer 2013 is below.

11.06.13       Economic Anthropology
Pierre Bourdieu (2005) 'The state and the construction of the market' and Part II 'Principles of an economic anthropology' in The Social Structures of the Economy Polity, pp. 89-125 and 193-223.

24.04.13       Slavery          

Frederick Douglass (1888) ‘I denounce so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud!' Speech delivered on the Twenty-Sixth Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C., April 16, 1888

Katie McDade (2011) 'Liverpool slave merchant entrepreneurial networks, 1725–1807' Business History Vol. 53:7.

Jenny B. Wahl 'The Jurisprudence of American Slave Sales' The Journal of Economic History Vol. 56, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 143-169

06.03.13        Back to Marx

M. Cain (1974) 'The main themes of Marx' and Engels' sociology of law' 1:2 British Journal of Law and Society 136

K. Marx (1939) 'Introduction: Production, consumption, distribution, Exchange (Circulation)' in Grundisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [Translation by Martin Nicolaus] Penguin Books and New Left Review, 1993.

30.01.13        Legal realism

Robert Hale  (1943) 'Bargaining, Duress, and Economic Liberty' Columbia Law Review 63

Sally Engle Merry (2006) 'New Legal Realism and the Ethnography of Transnational Law' 31 Law and Social Inquiry 975.

Mark C. Suchman and Elizabeth Mertz  (2010)'Toward a New Legal Empiricism: Empirical Legal Studies and New Legal Realism'  Annual Review of Law and Social Science 555-79.

05.12.12        Performing the econo-legal         

Michel Callon (2006) 'What does it mean to say that economics is performative?' No. 5 Papiers de Recherche du Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris.

Judith Butler (2010) 'Performative agency' 3:2 Journal of Cultural Economy

24.10.12        Informality: costs, benefits and human life

Prabha Kotiswaran (2008) 'Born Unto Brothels: Toward a Legal Ethnography of Sex Work in an Indian Red-Light Area' 33:2 Law & Social Inquiry 579-629.

Hernando De Soto (1990) 'The costs and importance of law' in The Other Path: The invisible revolution in the Third World, Chapter 5.

30.05.12        Max Weber and 'the' law and development 'movement'

C. Thomas (2006) 'Max Weber, Talcott Parsons and the Sociology of Legal Reform: A Reassessment with Implications for Law and Development' 15:2 Minnesota Journal of International Law' pp. 383-424

M. Weber (1925)  'The economic system and the normative orders' in Economy and Society M. Rheinstein ed. (1967) Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society.  Translated by E. Shils and M. Rheinstein, pp 11-40.

02.05.12        Law and economy through the lens of 'community'

Roger Cotterrell (2008) 'Community as a legal concept? Some uses of a law and community approach in legal theory' in Living Law: Studies in Legal and Social Theory. Farnham: Ashgate, Chapter 2.

Amanda Perry-Kessaris (2011) 'Reading the story of law and embeddedness through a community lens: A Polyani-meets-Cotterrell economic sociology of law?' 62:3 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly.

21.03.12        Economics as if people mattered

E. F. Schumacher (1973) 'Buddhist economics' in Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered Vintage Press: Chapter 4.

D. McCloskey ( 2002) The Secret Sins of Economics Prickly Paradigm No. 4. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

08.02.12        Legal reasoning in financial markets

Annelise Riles (2011) Collateral Knowledge: Legal reasoning in global financial markets. Chicago: Chicago University Press: Chapter 4 'Placeholders: Engaging the Hayekian Critique of Financial Regulation'; Chapter 5 'Virtual Transparency'.

14.12.11        Equality law: legal reasoning and organizational practice

Lauren B. Edelman, Sally Riggs Fuller and Iona Mara-Drita (2001) ‘Diversity Rhetoric and the Managerialization of Law' (2001) 106:6 American Journal of Sociology, 1589-1641.
Susan Sturm (2005)  'Law's Role in Addressing Complex Discrimination' in Laura Beth Nielsen & Robert L. Nelson (eds) Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research: Rights and Realities, Springer.

02.11.11        Market governance in colonial India

Ritu Birla (2009) 'Introduction' and  'Hedging bets: Speculation, gambling and market ethics 1890-1930' in Stages of Capital: Law, culture and market governance in late colonial India Durham and London: Duke University Press pp. 1-32 and 143-98.

21.09.11        Delving deeper into Polanyi         

Polanyi, K. (1944) ‘The self regulating market and the fictitious commodities’ in The Great Transformation, Chapter 6.

F. Block 'Understanding the Diverging Trajectories of the United States and Western Europe: A Neo-Polanyian Analysis'

20.07.11        Neoliberalism and law      

B. Z. Tamanaha (2008) 'The Dark Side of the Relationship between the Rule of Law and Liberalism' 33 NYU Journal of Law and Liberty

R. A. Posner (1995) ‘Introduction: Pragmatism, economics, liberalism’ in Overcoming Law Harvard University Press, Chapter 1.

08.06.11        Social capital in an economic sociology of law             World Bank (2000) The Nexus between Violent Conflict, Social Capital and Social Cohesion: Case Studies from Cambodia and Rwanda , SCIWP 23.

Ben Fine (2008) 'Social capital in wonderland: the World Bank behind the looking glass'  8:3 Progress in Development Studies 261-269

11.04.11        Polanyian versions of economic sociology of law

Sabine Frerichs (2011) ‘Re-embedding neo-liberal constitutionalism: A Polanyian case for the economic sociology of law’ in C. Joerges and J. Falke (2011) Karl Polanyi, Globalisation and the Potential of Law in Transnational Market Oxford: Hart.

Fred Block (2003) 'Karl Polanyi and the writing of The Great Transformation' Theory and Society

23.02.11    The Case for an Economic Sociology of Law      

Richard Swedberg. 2003. The Case for an Economic Sociology of Law. Theory and Society 32:1–37

Legal treasures tours

Legal Treasures Tours are intended to enable those who research legal phenomena to explore some of the legal treasures--manuscripts, photographs, maps, audio-visual material, rare books, ephemera, works of art with a legal dimension--that are hidden or showcased in world leading collections. They are opportunities to see and touch unique materials, to place them in the historical and social contexts that render them 'legal' phenomena, and in so doing to consider their moral subtext. I began organising them on an ad hoc basis in early 2012, first asking the experts (archivists, curators and librarians) to construct and lead them, and then having a go myself.

The first port of call was the SOAS Archives and Special Collections with Susannah Rayner. There we viewed, among other things, material from the Restatement of African Law Project at SOAS, papers documenting the mid 1800s property transactions of entrepreneur Henry Alexander Ince in the British Settlement in Shanghai, campaign posters from War on Want and the heated correspondence they generated between George Galloway and the Charities Commission and letters and images relating to the role of missionary John Smith in the 1823 Demerara Uprising in Jamaica. 

The second port of call was the India Office Records at the British Library with Antonia Moon. There we viewed, among other things, the diaries of a C18th magistrate in Surat, the enchanting strategies employed by Thief Detector Sheikh Khyrulla of Madras, an opinion of the solicitors of the East India Company as to whether the estate of a wildly disorganised employee might be pursued for compensation, proceedings of the Sedition Committee, and certificates of freedom issued to those walking away from slavery in Aden. For an account of these first two tours see SLSA Newsletter No. 67 p. 10

The third port of call, completed as part of a Folke Bernadotte Academy workshop on the theme Addicted to Law was the British Museum. To complete the tour see here. 

In 2014 I am joining with colleagues Lisa Dickson and Sophie Vigneron, and funding from Kent Law School, to take Kent LLM students on Legal Treasures Tours.

Future tours will include the National Portrait Gallery, the Wellcome Trust Collection, and the Hunterian Museum