Bankruptcy

Welcome Annelise Riles

By Adam Levitin

Credit Slips would like to welcome Annelise Riles as a guest blogger. Annelise is the Jack G. Clarke Chair in Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, where she teaches in both the Law School and the Anthropology Department. Annelise's work examines financial institutions and networks from an anthropological perspective.  

As a would-be historian, I am a particular fan of anthropological (and sociological) studies of consumer finance and the institutions involved there in. There aren't many, but they bring a much needed dose of reality to a field that is too often analyzed through economic theory. Legal scholarship rarely engages in the sort of qualitative field interviews that are the bread and butter of anthropology. (I recognize that there are important exceptions, including work by co-bloggers and past guest bloggers.) This is not just a matter of pesky internal review boards, but simply because this method of acquiring knowledge is not hard-wired into legal academia. (Given that it is somewhat analogous to the deposition, there's a lingering irony.) While we are not all going to becoming anthropologists, there's an enormous amount we can learn from the anthro literature about how regulators and market participants actually think , and I'm thrilled that Annelise will be sharing some of the insights with us on the Slips. Welcome Annelise!

Full post as published by Credit Slips on January 03, 2011 (boomark / email).