In Memoriam
Sally Falk Moore
By Lauren Benton
The renowned legal anthropologist Sally Falk Moore died May 2, 2021, in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 97. Her pathbreaking scholarship had a profound influence on generations of legal historians.
Professor Moore completed her law degree at Columbia University in 1945 at the age of only 19, as one of two women in her graduating class. Moore then worked as a lawyer for a Wall Street firm, one of the few that would then hire women as attorneys. After a year, she left to participate as a staff attorney in the Nuremburg trials. Although Professor Moore later wrote that she was “the youngest and least important lawyer on the prosecution staff,” the experience was formative. Moore recalled that it prompted her to think deeply about the relation of law and politics. On returning to the United States, rather than going back to corporate practice, she entered graduate school in anthropology at Columbia. Her plan was to study for just a year while waiting for a position to open up as a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.
Instead of going to work for the U.N., Sally Falk Moore became one of the most influential scholars of legal anthropology in the American academy – and in the world. Moore’s originality as a scholar in legal studies was shaped in part by her entrance into the field as something of an autodidact. Legal anthropology had been developed largely by British scholars whose structural-functionalist approach was anathema to U.S. cultural anthropologists at the time. After writing an award-winning dissertation that became her first book, Power and Property in Inca Peru, Moore at first had difficulty finding a university position. She wrote movingly about pursuing her career in phases as she juggled research and writing with family life, and as she encountered discrimination against women in the academy. After relocating with her family to Los Angeles, Moore found a position at the University of Southern California and was a founding member of its anthropology department. In L.A., she made the bold decision to learn Swahili and embark on fieldwork on law among the Chagga and Meru peoples of Tanzania.
It was in connection with her study of African legal systems that Professor Moore developed her influential perspectives on law and culture. She authored a stunningly original 1973 article on law as a “semi-autonomous social field,” a concept designed to characterize arenas of legal and social action in which rule-guided behavior and coercion operate in connection with state law but also in independent ways. Moore then went on to develop a “processual approach” to the study of law and legal systems, an anthropological and historical version of the legal process school that was so influential in the 1960s and 70s.. Her 1978 book, Law as Process; An Anthropological Approach, insists on the centrality of history to understanding legal systems and cultures. She criticized commonly accepted views of law as a static system of rules, emphasizing instead the emergence or norms and institutions through legal practice. She also called attention to the imprint of history on legal cultures in the present.
Professor Moore modeled this processual approach to law in her pathbreaking Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980, published by Cambridge University Press in 1986. Pushing against portrayals of customary law as a remnant of traditional society, Social Facts and Fabrications shows customary law operating in dynamic relation to both state law and colonial power, often acquiring new forms in the process. Moore’s work offered many other methodological innovations and theoretical contributions. Anticipating later scholarly developments was Moore’s insight that the state, like customary legal arenas, was not a totality but “an organizer of particular projects.” Moore described the state as a bundle of practices, and she demonstrated this perspective in relation to both colonial and post-colonial governments.
Throughout her career, Sally Falk Moore complemented her devotion to research with deep engagement in teaching. She moved from USC to UCLA in 1977, then in 1981 took up a position at Harvard, where for decades she regularly offered a course in the anthropology of law as the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Anthropology and Affiliated Professor of International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. She was unfailingly generous as a mentor. Former student John Borneman wrote that she was the perfect combination of “intellectually critical and unquestioningly supportive.” That sensitivity and unflagging support extended to the many African scholars who benefitted from opportunities to collaborate with Moore, either on scholarship or in the policy work she undertook in West Africa in the 1990s.
Still inspiring us in her nineties, in 2016, Professor Moore gathered a collection of essays for publication under the title Comparing Possibilities. Princeton anthropologist Julia Elyachar described the book as an “extraordinary collection” that “shows Moore anticipating by decades entire subfields.” More than half the book’s content relates directly to legal history. In reognition of her deep and lasting influence on the field, the ASLH celebrated Sally Falk Moore as a Distinguished Honorary Fellow at its 2019 annual meeting in Boston.