Fernanda Pirie's The Anthropology of Law is an exciting introduction to this ethnographically informed field of inquiry. Although a number of texts on anthropology and law have been published in recent years, Pirie's commentary is imbued with her own insightful contributions that help to more clearly define the field and at the same time make it accessible to a wide range of scholars across the social sciences and humanities. Pirie compelling shows how legal scholars—be they historians, philosophers, theorists, sociologists, political scientists, or lawyers by training—must engage with the critical questions posed by anthropologists of law if they want their research to remain relevant and applicable in the coming decades.

Pirie begins with a simple but important statement: the anthropology of law is the study of the nature of law and the assumptions and conventions that inform a society's legal relations. To put it another way, the anthropology of law helps us understand how law develops as a form of reasoning, authority, symbolism, and interpretation. Importantly, and this distinguishes it from most sociolegal scholarship, an anthropological approach to law is not reducible to an analysis of law's functioning, imposition, and enforcement. It is primarily the study of what law is, not what law does.

Anthropologists of law problematize Western notions of “law,” which are conventionally presented as state-bound formations. This state law paradigm “equates law with sovereignty, assumes a world divided into neat jurisdictions, and presents law as the foundation of regularity and order” (15). In contrast, the anthropology of law presents an open-ended exploration that seeks to describe and understand how legalism operates in various societies even if what is being analyzed is not recognized as law by the people through whom it is constituted. As a social form, law manifests across time and geography in numerous patterns, categories, and inconsistencies. Legalism reflects a society's way of thinking, believing, organizing and being in the world, as manifested through its social and political relations.

Pirie's The Anthropology of Law is theoretically rich and intellectually wide-ranging. For example, in Chapter 2, Pirie engages with the concept of legal pluralism and the debates among scholars waged as to the value of law as an analytical category. Some scholars argue that the concept of legal pluralism allows us to think about different cultural understandings of social rules, norms, customs, negotiations that may not be recognized as law in Western societies. Other scholars argue that such a wide-ranging definition of law suggests that all social and normative relations could be constructed as “legal,” hence making the term vacuous and comparatively useless. Against these entrenched debates, Pirie outlines a way to move forward by focusing on legalism, which, she argues, is “the explicit formulation of rules and categories” that “set standards for behavior and provide discursive resources that can be used for justification and argument about right and wrong” (14). This moves the conversation past a comparative analysis of how law functions, to a more nuanced comparison of law's social formations. As Pirie explains more deeply in Chapter 6 and subsequent chapters, legalism is a way of thinking and acting. It is not just a set of rules, but rather helps to order the messy reality of everyday life and is a type of juristic thinking that “seeks relations between rules, distinctions between categories, and cannons of interpretation” (156).

In Chapters 4 and 5, Pirie discusses major formal legal systems to show their different evolutions and forms. Chapter 4 explores Hindu, Roman, and Islamic legal thought as manifested through the writings and reasoning of intellectuals, and Chapter 5 engages with Greek, Chinese, and English law, which, Pirie argues, all invoke a higher “form of order, whether divine, cosmic or tradition” that grant law an “unchanging, sometimes sacrosanct, authority” (129). The primary point of these two chapters is to show that legalism should not be reduced to a description of how law is practiced in courts, through the judiciary or as governmental power. Legalism, Pirie argues, is much more than practice, and must take into account reasoning, authority, symbolism, spirituality, and meaning beyond that demonstrated through material and instrumental concerns.

The final three chapters explore how law embodies ethics, ideologies, and aspirations, and the ways in which these elements are borrowed and retooled by specific societies. These chapters are important in underscoring the complexity and variance in legal formations and engagements, be these within small village settings or large-scale national and international polities. As Pirie adeptly concludes, it is the tension between legalism and the ideals that it invokes that make an anthropological approach to law such an interesting object of study. The Anthropology of Law compelling demonstrates that understanding the variance in law's forms and foundations is not only interesting, but also absolutely essential, given both the rise in international circles of aspirations for universal global legalism, and concurrent escalations of local and regional legal conflict around the world.