Anthropology and soft law

This chapter argues that soft law is an interesting field to explore from a legal anthropological perspective and provides the context for understanding it within global legal issues and processes. It outlines the emergence of the notion of soft law and summarizes the controversies it has raised among legal scholars and law practitioners. Then it suggests why despite the elusive character of the notion and its uncertain normative status, as soon as we move beyond a number of emblematic concerns for law practitioners, soft law mechanisms and practices appear to be a vantage point from which to explore the emerging transnational legal order and particularly the relations among state, supra-state, and non-state (private) forms of regulation. Finally, the chapter discusses a number of anthropological writings embracing soft law in a variety of social fields and contexts, highlighting the ways in which they ethnographically deal with global legal pluralism and soft law tools, ideologies and practices.