NUMBER 42 / 1998
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Sammy ADELMAN holds the degrees of B.A. and LL.B. from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, LL.M. from Harvard University, USA, and Ph.D. from the University of Warwick, UK. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, University of Warwick, his fields of specialisation being law in development, legal theory, human rights and comparative labour law. He is co-editor (with Abdul Paliwala) of Law and Crisis in the Third World (London: Hans Zell, 1993).
Abdourahaman CHAÏBOU est docteur en droit de l'Université d'Orléans où il a soutenu en 1997 une thèse portant sur Le transfert des concepts de droit processuel français au Niger. Il enseigne actuellement à la Faculté des sciences économiques et juridiques de l'Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey (Niger).
Filip DE BOECK is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Africa Research Centre of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He has conducted extensive field research among the aLuund of southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, former Zaire) since 1987, and is currently preparing a book on the impact of diamond trading on rural and urban life in the DRC and the Angolan province of Lunda Norte. Other topics of interest include: ritual, state-society relations, and postcolonial theory. His research has produced numerous articles in academic journals and books. He also co-edited (with R. Devisch and D. Jonckers) Alimentations, traditions et développement en Afrique intertropicale (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995).
René DEVISCH is a Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven where he teaches social anthropology, and is a member of the Belgian School of Psychoanalysis, and of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences (Belgium). He is Director of the Africa Research Centre, University of Leuven. He started his research in southwestern Zaire/Congo in the early 1970s and since 1986 has worked in Kinshasa for four to six weeks annually. Besides medical anthropological collaboration with family doctors in Antwerp and Brussels in 1980-86, his research and supervision of doctoral research has extended to Tunis, northern Ghana, southern Nigeria, western Congo, southern Ethiopia, southwestern Kenya, northwestern Tanzania, northwestern Namibia, and northern Israel.
Baudouin DUPRET est licencié en droit et en langue arabe et islamologie de l'Université Catholique de Louvain, diplômé en Middle Eastern Studies de l'American University au Caire, collaborateur du CEDEJ (Le Caire). Il est actuellement chercheur au Centre d'études et de recherches sur le monde arabe contemporain (CERMAC) de l'Université catholique de Louvain.
Marie-Claire FOBLETS, LL.M., Lic. Phil., received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Leuven in 1990. She practised at the Brussels Bar from 1985 to 1994. She teaches Law and Legal Anthropology at the Universities of Leuven, Antwerp and Brussels (K.U.B.). She is presently Head of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leuven. She is the author of Les familles maghrébines et la justice en Belgique (Paris: Karthala, 1994) and the editor of Familles-Islam-Europe. Le droit confronté au changement (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996) and Femmes marocaines et conflits familiaux en immigration: quelles solutions juridiques appropriées? (Antwerp: Maklu, 1998).
Carol GREENHOUSE is professor of anthropology at Indiana University. Past president of the Law and Society Association, her books and articles address ethnographic and comparative issues of law and legal consciousness, especially in the United States. Her discussion in this volume was subsequently revised and adapted for inclusion in her book, A Moment's Notice: Time Politics Across Cultures (1996). Her forthcoming edited volume, Democracy and Ethnography: Constructing Identities in Multicultural States is a collection of essays on culture and legal pluralism in the United States and Spain.
Anne GRIFFITHS is on the editorial board of the Journal of Legal Pluralism. Born in Scotland she holds the degrees of LL.B. (Edinburgh) and Ph.D. (London). A member of the Faculty of Law at Edinburgh University since 1980 she has also taught as a Visiting Professor at the University of Botswana, Cornell University, the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include family and comparative law as well as anthropology of law and gender studies. Her most recent publications include Family Law (W. Green, Scotland, 1997) and In the Shadow of Marriage: Gender and Justice in an African Community (University of Chicago Press, 1997). She is currently carrying out a comparative research project entitled Representing Children: An Ethnographic Study of Child Protection Proceedings in Scotland and New York.
Andrew LADLEY obtained the degree of Ph.D. from the University of London in 1985 for a thesis entitled Courts and Authority: A Study of a Shona Village Court in Rural Zimbabwe. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.
Jan-Michiel OTTO is a member of the Law School of the University of Leiden and director of the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law and Administration in Non-Western Countries. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1987 and has conducted extensive field research in India, Egypt and Indonesia. He is presently preparing a book on Law and Administration in Developing Countries.
Filip REYNTJENS teaches courses on African Law and Politics at the Universities of Antwerp, Louvain and Brussels. He is chairman of the board of the African Studies and Documentation Centre (ASDOC-CEDAF) in Brussels, fellow of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences of Belgium, member of the board of the International Third World Legal Studies Association (New York) and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Mbuji-Mayi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A specialist in Sub-Saharan Africa, his research focuses on the Great Lakes area of Central Africa, on which he has published many articles and several books. His latest are: L'Afrique des grands lacs en crise (Paris 1994); Burundi. Breaking the Cycle of Violence (London 1995); Rwanda. Trois jours qui ont fait basculer l'histoire (Brussels and Paris 1996); and L'Afrique des grands lacs. Annuaire 1996-1997 (Paris 1997).
Simon ROBERTS is a professor of law at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he graduated LL.B. (1962) and Ph.D. (1968). Early in his career he taught at the Institute of Public Administration, Blantyre, Malawi (1963-1964) and later acted as Adviser on Customary Law to the Botswana Government (1968-1971). He is author of: Order and Dispute (Penguin Books, 1979); (with John L. Comaroff) Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context (University of Chicago Press, 1981); (with W.T. Murphy) Understanding Property Law (Fontana, 1987; 3rd ed. Sweet & Maxwell, 1998); and (with Michael Palmer) Dispute Processes (Butterworths, 1998). He is a member of the Editorial Committee of The Modern Law Review, and of the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Board on Family Law.
Deyssi RODRIGUEZ-TORRES est docteur en sciences politiques (Bordeaux). Elle est actuellement maître de conférences aux FUCAM (Mons, Belgique) et chercheur attachée au CREPAO (Pau, France). Dans le cadre des recherches qu'elle mène depuis 1992 sur la pauvreté urbaine et la violence en Afrique de l'Est, elle a effectué de nombreux séjours à Nairobi.
Frank A. SALAMONE is professor of anthropology at Iona College, New York State. He holds the degrees of B.A. (St. John Fisher College), M.A. (University of Rochester) and Ph.D. (SUNY-Buffalo). He is editor of The Yanomami and Their Interpreters, co-editor with Walter Adams of Explorations in Anthropology and Theology, author of Gods and Goods in Africa and author or editor of six other books and author or co-author of over 100 articles. He is currently editing a book on the role of science and foundations in fostering racism in research and co-authoring a book on the Luchy Memorial Freed Slaves Home in Nigeria.
Jacques VANDERLINDEN is a Professor of Law emeritus (Free University of Brussels), and is currently associated with the Universities of Moncton and Paris XII, where he teaches courses in Comparative Law, Aboriginal Law, Canadian Legal History, Comparative European Legal History and Comparative History of the Expansion of European Laws. Born in the Congo, he has been a Visiting Professor in the Universities of Abidjan, Addis Ababa, Kigali and Kinshasa, in addition to European and American universities. He is a fellow of the Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences of Belgium and an Associate Fellow of the International Academy for Comparative Law. His most recent books include: Comparer les droits (Brussels, 1995); Histoire de la common law (Montréal-Brussels, 1996); and Anthropologie juridique (Paris, 1996). He currently has under the press a book on marriage in French Acadia in the 17th century.
Gordon R. WOODMAN is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Legal Pluralism. For a biography see nr. 39.