As interdisciplinary scholars, we often feel like we live on the professional margins – trained in multiple disciplines yet challenged to bridge the disciplinary registers of each. Although “law” is the primary common ground in law and society scholarship, many of us are trained in other, complementary academic disciplines, which give us unique perspectives into the interaction between law and society. How can we employ these perspectives in ways that help us effectively speak to our various disciplinary audiences? My involvement with law and society scholarship and the Law & Society Association (LSA) has provided me with the professional development necessary to navigate scholarly life on the disciplinary margins. For sociolegal scholars who feel like their interdisciplinary research places them outside the norms of their respective discipline(s), engagement with law and society scholarship can support us as we navigate life between disciplinary worlds.

Understanding the vulnerability that comes with scholarly reflections on one’s unique identity and perspective (Chua and Massoud Reference Chua and Massoud2024); in this short essay, I draw from my own experiences navigating professional life in the academy to explore how my engagement with law and society scholarship has helped me navigate scholarly life between disciplinary worlds. To do so, I share narratives from my matriculation through the academy and highlight them with two complementary theories from law and society scholarship: “positionality” and “translation.” By providing practical tools for those of us situated between academic worlds, these theoretical frameworks may be employed as scholarly connective tissue. Indeed, employing my own positionality while being an effective translator has helped me bridge my anthropological and legal worlds.

I work and teach in a law school – a doctrinally focused institution where the “rigidity of the categories is part of the cultural script” (Ballakrishnen Reference Ballakrishnen2025, 324). Yet, I’m also trained in anthropology, a social science discipline where scholarly fluidity is widely accepted (Tejani Reference Tejani, Talesh, Mertz and Klug2021). Like other legal anthropologists, I have had concerns that my anthropological work would be deemed too “descriptive” for my law faculty colleagues who are generally devoted to making more “normative” claims (Das Acevedo Reference Das Acevedo2022; Erie Reference Erie2022). Moreover, I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, a city often fetishized for its perceived exoticism (Moehn Reference Moehn2012), rather than its intellectual rigor. And I am a Black male. While these lived experiences inform my professional identity, they place me outside the norm of most law school faculty, who have often had judicial clerkships and big law experience.

I worked as a lawyer in the music industry for many years before leaving to pursue a PhD in anthropology. As a music lawyer, I worked on copyright and music sampling issues but always craved more knowledge of the cultural side of these matters. Studying anthropology provided the opportunity to conduct ethnographic fieldwork, which helped satisfy that craving. I was unfamiliar with LSA at that time but went to graduate school at UC Santa Cruz where a prominent LSA scholar, Mark Fathi Massoud, is a professor. He provided helpful comments on one of my first papers, later published in a peer-reviewed anthropology journal (Omari Reference Omari2018). Looking back at that time, which was just over a decade ago, I recall my dissertation advisor telling me that I write like a lawyer and that I had to learn to write like an anthropologist. That advice still makes me chuckle because when I entered the legal academy, I was told that I write too much like an anthropologist and that I had to learn to write like a law professor. Although I did not understand it at that time, what my dissertation advisor was telling me was that I had to learn to become a better “translator.” How could my seemingly descriptive anthropological claims be translated for a legal audience more concerned with normative prescriptions? The concept of “translation” – understanding “all the manners of transformation that happen when scholars attempt to communicate across established disciplinary boundaries” (Mertz Reference Mertz2016, 24) – has been with me for quite a while now.

I have continued to grapple with the apparent dichotomy between the ostensibly descriptive world of anthropology and the more normative world of law. But engaging with anthropologists from the law and society community has caused me to reconsider this purported division. For example, legal anthropologist Deepa Das Acevedo (Reference Das Acevedo2022) has argued that while legal scholars tend to view the work of anthropologists as descriptive, the recent trend in anthropology is producing scholarship with a more normative bent. Other scholars in legal anthropology have suggested that “description is the mode through which anthropologists think reflexively and comparatively, methods that may have normative ends” (Erie Reference Erie2022, 816). Because legal scholars do not generally think of anthropological scholarship as normative, the onus is usually on me – the interdisciplinary anthropologist – to communicate these theoretical and methodological differences to my doctrinal colleagues. My involvement with this community – LSA and its numerous, similarly situated scholars – has helped me understand how to be an effective translator.

Legal anthropologist Elizabeth Mertz (Reference Mertz2016) has conducted linguistic studies on translation and found that scholars working across disciplinary boundaries should consider the contextual meaning and structure of their language. These considerations affect the assumptions and norms at play in various interdisciplinary encounters. These linguistic considerations – translating – were essentially what Professor Massoud was trying to explain in his comments on my draft all those years ago. How can I more effectively communicate my interdisciplinary work to multiple scholarly audiences simultaneously? Moreover, how will my work be interpreted by the various scholarly audiences with which it engages? Learning to apply theoretical frameworks like translation in my own professional writing has been pivotal to my development in the legal academy. For instance, in recent work, I have applied theories like “the Anthropocene” (Omari Reference Omari2025) and “digital authoritarianism” (Omari et al. Reference Omari, Rueda-Saiz and Wilson2024), which are typically associated with the social sciences, to my doctrinal research in law. By comprehending the context and structure of these theoretical frameworks and their potential normative applications, I have effectively translated them to doctrinal audiences. Additionally, a recent edited volume – co-edited by Massoud – has helped me understand that I could more effectively translate my work by learning to exercise the “power of positionality” (Chua and Massoud Reference Chua and Massoud2024).

Positionality in research refers to “the disclosure of how an author’s self-identifications, experiences of marginalization, or professional privileges influence their research” (Massoud Reference Massoud2022 at S65, Reference Massoud, Chua and Massoud2024). Since where one sits often influences how one sees the world, drawing on positionality adds value to sociolegal research methods. As Massoud demonstrates in a quantitative study of articles in this journal, those scholars most likely to reveal their positionality are women and ethnic minorities. For these reasons, exercising positionality also places these already-marginalized scholars in a vulnerable position and exposes them to unfair critique. Realizing the inherent vulnerabilities that come with such an approach, I also understood that one way to become a better translator was to learn to employ my positionality as both a law professor and anthropologist.

Ironically, without understanding its burdens or theoretical implications, I had written about my own positionality years ago in my dissertation. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil studying issues of digital rights and governance in that country (Omari Reference Omari2018, Reference Omari2020). Among my field sites were certain favelas Footnote ¹ in Rio de Janeiro where I conducted participant observation and informal interviews with residents who were affected by their government’s digital policies. I also employed similar ethnographic methods in a Brazilian law school with professors who helped craft those digital policies. While unaware of it at that time, it was my positionality as an African American lawyer and ethnographer that guided my translation between those field sites. My Blackness helped me relate to the favela residents, who were primarily Afro-Brazilians. Many of those residents were young and admired certain aspects of American culture, like hip hop. Since I was a young Black American, the favela residents, in many ways, viewed me as a cultural ambassador – seeing me as a direct liaison to the American hip hop culture they had grown to love. Exercising my positionality helped me solidify access in an important field site, while demonstrating the significance of law and society theory to anthropological research methods.

Additionally, my status as an American lawyer and anthropology graduate student provided credibility in the law school. In Brazil, there are distinct socioeconomic divisions between o morro – the hill or favela – and o asfalto – the asphalt or street (Omari Reference Omari2018; Penglase Reference Penglase2009; Scott Reference Scott2016). Consistent with these divisions, I found that many students and faculty from the law school came from privileged backgrounds and seldom engaged personally with favela residents. Many in the law school found it odd that I was spending so much time in the favelas, which they deemed dangerous. In certain ways, I became a translator by assisting their understanding of the “on the ground” effects of the laws they helped create (Talesh et al. Reference Talesh, Mertz, Klug, Talesh, Mertz and Klug2021). Through conducting fieldwork in favelas and at a Brazilian law school, my research was methodologically both “top down” and “bottom up” (Erlanger et al. Reference Erlanger, Garth, Larson, Mertz, Nourse and Wilkins2005), which allowed me to understand the context and norms at play in these disparate environments and helped facilitate my role as translator in each.

Although I was unaware of the theories of positionality and translation at the time, I unwittingly employed them throughout my fieldwork. This speaks to the efficacy of law and society scholarship and the practical effects of its theories. For sociolegal scholars who feel like they may be on the professional margins, leveraging our lived experiences – whether they be self-identifications or professional backgrounds – when engaging with and studying various communities can help us become more effective translators. For me, this involves employing theoretical frameworks from law and society, including the power of positionality, as the connective tissue that binds the anthropological and legal worlds.