Fernanda Pirie

Professor of the Anthropology of Law

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Centre for Socio-Legal Studies

Manor Road,
Oxford
OX1 3UQ

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01865 (2)84229

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Biography

An anthropologist specialising in Tibetan societies, Fernanda uses both ethnographic and historical methods to study and compare legal practices and texts. She has argued for a new anthropology of law, which engages both with legal theory and legal history: The Anthropology of Law (OUP, 2013). This builds on themes and debates developed in the Oxford Legalism project, which brought together scholars from anthropology, history, and other disciplines to compare wide-ranging empirical examples (Legalism, OUP, 4 vols).

These themes form the basis for Fernanda’s research into Tibetan legal history and an AHRC-funded project on the legal history of medieval Tibet: Legal Ideology in Tibet: Politics, Practice, and Religion (2016–18) This has led to a series of publications and a web-site containing source material (www.tibetanlaw.org).

Her latest book is a global history of law, which was published in November 2021: The Rule of Laws: a 4,000-year quest to order the world (Profile Books, Basic Books).

Fernanda continues to publish on legal anthropology and Tibetan legal history, as well as related issues, such as comparison in law and anthropology and the relationship between empirical studies and legal theory.

Qualifications DPhil in Social Anthropology (Oxford) 2002, MSc in Social Anthropology (UCL) 1998, Called to the Bar 1988, BA in French and Philosophy (Oxford) 1986.

Publications

Recent additions

  • F Pirie, 'The amchi as villager: status and its refusal in Ladakh' in L. Pordie and S. Kloos (eds), Healing at the Periphery (Duke University Press 2022)
    ISBN: 9781478914454
  • F Pirie, 'The drum of the law and the turquoise dragon: images of authority in Tibetan legal texts. ' in D. Lange, J. Ptackova, M. Wettstein, and M. Wulff (eds), Crossing Boundaries: Tibetan Studies Unlimited (Prague: Academia Publishing House 2021)
  • F Pirie, Moral Dilemmas in Slave-Owning Societies: Evidence from Early Legal Texts (E B Verlag 2021)
    Slavery is not a natural state. It arises when people or classes in a society assume the right to treat others as their property. And yet the status of slaves has rarely been defined by law, even when slavery was an accepted social fact. This publication examines the laws that did deal with slavery, from the earliest written rules in Mesopotamia, India, China, Rome, and the Islamic world, to medieval Europe and Tibet. It is evident that, rather than offering comprehensive definitions, the lawmakers were dealing with the complications that arose from the instability of the state, including issues of manumission, legal capacity, and the status of children. People could become slaves without the need for legal intervention, as a result of warfare or debt, but many slaves acquired freedoms, presenting complications that the lawmakers tried to address. They also, in many cases, hint at moral discomfort, suggesting that the act of lawmaking forced slave-owners to face up to the fact that they were treating other people as property.
    ISBN: 978-3-86893-379-6

All publications

Chapter (24)

F Pirie, 'The amchi as villager: status and its refusal in Ladakh' in L. Pordie and S. Kloos (eds), Healing at the Periphery (Duke University Press 2022)
ISBN: 9781478914454
F Pirie, 'Anthropology of Law' in M. Sellers and S. Kirste (eds), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (Springer 2021)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_110-2
ISBN: 978-94-007-6730-0
F Pirie, 'The drum of the law and the turquoise dragon: images of authority in Tibetan legal texts. ' in D. Lange, J. Ptackova, M. Wettstein, and M. Wulff (eds), Crossing Boundaries: Tibetan Studies Unlimited (Prague: Academia Publishing House 2021)
F Pirie, 'Laws and proverbs: the making and unmaking of moral rules in historic Tibet.' in B. Dupret, J. Colemans, and M. Travers (eds), Legal rules in practice: in the midst of law’s life. (Routledge. 2020)
This paper describes a society that turned its back on legal rules. Medieval Tibetan authors wrote approvingly of law, in the context of their political history, and attributed the establishment of a Buddhist polity in Tibet to the introduction of legal rules. Tibetan religious leaders also adopted the Vinaya, an extremely legalistic code of moral conduct formulated in India, which they taught the members of their monasteries. Yet they resisted creating their own legal rules. Even when giving moral guidance to the laity, they turned to a different style of writing, the open-ended and tacit advice offered by stories, examples, metaphors, and proverbs. This paper contrasts the two styles of guidance offered by legalistic rules and evocative proverbs. I suggests that influential Tibetans had a positive preference for appealing to sensibilities rather than formulating general rules.
F Pirie, 'Legalism: rules, categories, and texts.' in M-C. Foblets, M. Goodale, M. Sapignoli, and O. Zenke (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology. (Oxford University Press. 2020)
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198840534.013.19
Laws, rules, and texts, this paper argues, deserve more sustained attention by legal anthropologists. They have tended to turn their backs on doctrine and texts, but law and legal phenomena have taken legalistic forms practically since writing was invented. Historical and anthropological examples indicate that legalism, that is the use of general rules and abstract categories, is typical of law as a social form. Paying attention to this aspect of law, the chapter argues, helps to explain legal phenomena that have long puzzled anthropologists, in particular, an enduring fascination with law, despite its repeated use to enact and legitimate power. A focus on legalism, moreover, allows scholars to compare diverse empirical examples from the rich corpus of historical legal studies with more contemporary ethnographic work in order to reflect upon the nature of law as a social form.
ISBN: 9780198840534
F Pirie, 'The Art of Mediation: Law and Rhetoric in Medieval Tibet.' in M. Moscati, M. Palmer, and M. Roberts (eds), Comparative Dispute Resolution (Edward Elgar Publishing. 2020)
A treatise on law from medieval Tibet offers a rare opportunity to analyse historic processes of dispute resolution. The text makes provisions about the compensation due for death, injury, and divorce, and sets out procedures for resolving disputed allegations of theft. These indicate that social relations among Tibetans were shaped by principles of revenge and carefully negotiated social status, but the chapter argues that dispute resolution should also be understood as a cultural practice in its own right. In medieval Tibet, as the text makes clear, the parties to a dispute could use elaborate styles of rhetoric, appealing to obscure sayings and metaphors. Mediators negotiated justice, rather than looking to rules that define right and wrong. And the charisma of the mediator was fundamental. Like court room processes elsewhere, Tibetan mediation should be understood as a performance and an art, through which social relations were negotiated, established, and expressed.
F Pirie, 'The making of Tibetan law: the Khrims gnyis lta ba’i me long.' in J. Bischoff, P. Maurer, and C. Ramble (eds), On a Day of a Month of the Fire Bird Year. (Lumbini International Research Institute. 2020)
This chapter analyses the authorship and origins of the earliest known Tibetan legal treatise, called The Mirror of the Two Laws. Although much reproduced in modern editions, the text has received surprisingly little scholarly attention and the analysis is based on my own recent translation. I conclude that it must have been written in the in the decades after the fall of the Mongols’ Yuan administration in China, by or for the Phagmodru family, which was then trying to retain and consolidate the power in central Tibet. The writer of the treatise anchored his text firmly in Buddhist precedent and doctrine, suggesting that the Phagmodru wanted to present themselves as guardians of Tibet’s legal tradition. The treatise could have been commissioned with a view to persuading the Ming, then in power in China, that the Phagmodru were suitable recipients of their seals of authority. It might also have been distributed, or intended to be distributed, within central Tibet, in order to encourage local officials and administrators that their practices of mediation were following ancient Tibetan patterns; that they were acting within a religious tradition of which the Phagmodru were now the guardians. As a description of mediation practices and principles, the text could be regarded as a first step towards judicial systematization.
F Pirie, 'The sociology of law and legal anthropology' in J. Přibáň (ed), Research handbook on sociology of law. (Edward Elgar 2020)
This chapter argues that the distinctive contribution of anthropology to legal scholarship stems from its methodology. Long-term immersion in a field site and participant observation allow anthropologists to understand the world from the perspectives of their informants, to uncover meanings, and to take account of diversity. This leads to rich ethnographic description, characterized by detail and nuance. But it also produces theory- and model-building, which are firmly rooted in detailed empirical observation. The result is that anthropologists often question the categories that other legal scholars use to frame and analyse the law and its social roles. They raise new questions about what law is and does. They also use comparison amongst qualitative empirical case studies, allowing the terms of the comparison to arise from the cases, themselves. In these ways, anthropologists not only contribute rich and detailed cast studies to the body of legal scholarship, but they also question familiar assumptions about such issues as the relationship between law and the state, its capacity to regulate social life, its use in the resolution of disputes, and its attraction as a tool to both impose and challenge power, often in unexpected circumstances. They contribute, in these ways, to debates about what law is and does.
F Pirie, 'Legalism' in H. Callan (ed), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Wiley-Blackwell 2018)
F Pirie, 'Legal Theory and Legal History: A View from Anthropology' in M. del Mar and A. Lobban (eds), Law in Theory and History: New Essays on a Neglected Dialogue (Hart 2016)
F Pirie, 'State, Law, and Morality in Traditional Tibet' in J. Bischoff & S. Mullard (ed), Social Regulation: Case Studies from Tibetan History (Brill 2016)
F Pirie, 'Oaths and Ordeals in Tibetan Law' in D. Schuh (ed), Secular Law and Order in the Tibetan Highland (International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies 2015)
F Pirie, 'Rules, Proverbs, and Persuasion: Legalism and Rhetoric in Tibet' in Paul Dresch and Judith Scheele (eds), Legalism: Rules and Categories (OUP 2015)
F Pirie, 'Community, Justice, and Legalism: Elusive Concepts in Tibet' in Fernanda Pirie and Judith Scheele (eds), Legalism: Community and Justice (OUP 2014)
F Pirie and Judith Scheele, 'Justice, Community, and Law' in Fernanda Pirie and Judith Scheele (eds), Legalism: Community and Justice (OUP 2014)
F Pirie, 'Law and Religion in Historic Tibet' in F. and K. von Benda-Beckmann, M. Ramstedt, and B. Turner (eds), Religion in Disputes (Palgrave Macmillan 2013)
F Pirie and Justine Rogers, 'Pupillage: The Shaping of a Professional Elite' in J. Abbink and T. Salverda (eds), The Anthropology of Elites (Palgrave Macmillan 2013)
F Pirie, 'Who were the Tibetan Lawmakers?' in C. Ramble, P. Schwieger, and A. Travers (eds), Tibetans who Escaped the Historian's Net (Vajra Books 2013)
F Pirie, 'Legal Dramas on the Amdo Grasslands: Abolition, transformation, or Survival?' in K . Buffetrille (ed), Revisiting Rituals in a Changing Tibetan World (Brill 2012)
F Pirie, 'From Tribal Tibet: The Significance of the Legal Form' in M. Freeman and D. Napier (eds), Law and Anthropology (OUP 2009)
F Pirie, 'Kings, Monks, Bureaucrats, and the Police: Tibetan Responses to Law and Authority' in F. and K. van Benda-beckmann, and A. Griffiths (eds), The Power of Law in a Transnational World (Berghahn 2009)
F Pirie, 'Dancing in the Face of Death: Losar Celebrations in Photoksar' in M. van Beek and F. Pirie (eds), Modern Ladakh (Brill 2008)
F Pirie, 'Violence and Opposition among the Nomads of Amdo' in F. Pirie and T. Huber (eds), Conflict and Social Order in Tibet and Inner Asia (Brill 2008)
F Pirie, 'Order, Individualism, and Responsibility: Contrasting Dynamics on the Tibetan Plateau' in K. von Benda-Beckmann and F. Pirie (eds), Order and Disorder (Berghahn 2007)

Book (4)

F Pirie, Moral Dilemmas in Slave-Owning Societies: Evidence from Early Legal Texts (E B Verlag 2021)
Slavery is not a natural state. It arises when people or classes in a society assume the right to treat others as their property. And yet the status of slaves has rarely been defined by law, even when slavery was an accepted social fact. This publication examines the laws that did deal with slavery, from the earliest written rules in Mesopotamia, India, China, Rome, and the Islamic world, to medieval Europe and Tibet. It is evident that, rather than offering comprehensive definitions, the lawmakers were dealing with the complications that arose from the instability of the state, including issues of manumission, legal capacity, and the status of children. People could become slaves without the need for legal intervention, as a result of warfare or debt, but many slaves acquired freedoms, presenting complications that the lawmakers tried to address. They also, in many cases, hint at moral discomfort, suggesting that the act of lawmaking forced slave-owners to face up to the fact that they were treating other people as property.
ISBN: 978-3-86893-379-6
F Pirie, The Rule of Laws: a 4,000-year quest to order the world (Profile Books, Basic Books 2021)
The laws now enforced throughout the world are almost all modelled on systems developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During two hundred years of colonial rule, Europeans exported their laws everywhere they could. But they weren't filling a void: in many places, they displaced traditions that were already ancient when Vasco Da Gama first arrived in India. Even the Romans were inspired by earlier precedents. Where, then, did it all begin? And what has law been and done over the course of human history? In The Rule of Laws, pioneering anthropologist Fernanda Pirie traces the development of the world's great legal systems - Chinese, Indian, Roman, and Islamic - and the innumerable smaller traditions they inspired. At the heart of the story is a paradox: how did the pronouncements of the powerful became a vital weapon in ordinary people's fight for justice?
ISBN: 9781788163026, 9781541617957
F Pirie, The Anthropology of Law (OUP, Clarendon Law Series 2013)
F Pirie, Peace and Conflict in Ladakh: The Construction of a Fragile Web of Order (Brill 2007)

Journal Article (12)

F Pirie, 'Legalism: A Turn to History in the Anthropology of Law' (2019) 15 Clio@Themis
Notorious definitional debates have characterized the anthropology of law, and scholars have not reached consensus over how ‘law’ is to be distinguished from other social phenomena. This article suggests that light can be shed upon this issue by combining the insights of anthropologists and historians. Careful comparison among empirical examples highlights the importance of texts and the legal form. Case studies from Tibet are used to illustrate these points and draw attention to the phenomenon of legalism, that is, the use of generalizing rules and abstract categories to describe and organise the world. This provides a basis for exploring the nature and significance of law, both in the modern world and societies of the past.
ISBN: ISSN 2105-0929
F Pirie, 'Which two laws? The concept of khrims gnyis in medieval Tibet.' (2018) 26 Cahiers d'Extreme-Asie 41
The concept of trimnyi, two laws, emerges in the series of historical narratives created in Tibet’s medieval period, between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries. But what these laws were supposed to consist of is never made clear. This paper explores the origins of this pairing—of religious and royal laws—in early post-imperial texts and the ways in which the narratives developed up to the fifteenth century. I suggest that the concept of two laws was used to express the idea that Tibet’s Yarlung dynasty kings had based their political activities, including their law-making, on Buddhist principles. This allowed the authors to create an account of Tibet as a historic Buddhist polity, in whcih religious principles had provided the basis for the early kings’ practices of law and government. More than just an idealistic representation of Buddhism’s influence at the Yarlung court, I suggest that the account was probably also rooted in historical fact, reflecting events that unfolded when a new set of religious ideas was incorporated into established political structures.
ISBN: ISBN-13 : 9782855391786
F Pirie, 'Buddhist Law in Early Tibet: The Emergence of an Ideology.' (2017) 32 Journal of Law and Religion 406–422
DOI: 10.1017/jlr.2017.42
Tibet is distinct within the Buddhist regions of Asia for its claims to have developed religious laws. The rulers of its early empire—or so it is claimed by the writers of Tibetan historical narratives—civilized their people by creating laws on the basis of Buddhist principles. In fact, the earliest Tibetan laws were not linked in any significant way with Buddhist principles, even after the religion had been firmly established in the region. The more ideological account of Buddhist law found in later narratives was only developed as the structures of the empire were collapsing. The paper asks why and how the idea of Buddhist law first emerged, examining its development through a number of texts from the empire (sixth to ninth centuries) and the immediate post-imperial period (tenth to twelfth centuries). Their accounts of law-making were far from consistent, but they do seem to have resonated with at least one, tenth-century ruler. These narratives set the scene for a long series of historical accounts, in which the idea that Tibetan law was based on Buddhist principles took hold, and which was maintained well into the twentieth century.
F Pirie, A. Kubal and N. Creutzfeldt, 'Introduction: Exploring the Comparative in Socio-Legal Studies' (2016) 12 .International Journal of Law in Context 377–89
Among the diverse approaches to comparison in socio-legal studies, those that employ qualitative research, richness of detail and attention to context are the focus of this special issue. The Introduction draws on comparative law and social science literature to argue that comparison amongst studies of laws in contexts can follow different trajectories: the comparison may start from an assumption of similarity – in form, purposes or context – in order to identify significant differences; or it may identify significant similarity across social and cultural divides. What unites many of the projects of comparison undertaken by qualitative empirical researchers is that the points of relevant comparison are identified within the complexity of the empirical studies at hand; and they are allowed to emerge, or change, as the researcher comes to understand the facts and issues more deeply.
F Pirie, 'Legalism and the Anthropology of Law' (2015) 36 Recht der Werklijkeid 99
F Pirie, 'Comparison in the Anthropology and History of Law' (2014) 9 Journal of Comparative Law 88
F Pirie, 'The Limits of the State: Coercion and Consent in Chinese Tibet' (2013) 72 Journal of Asian Studies 69
F Pirie, 'Law Before Government: Ideology and Aspiration' (2010) 30 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 207
F Pirie, 'The Horse with Two Saddles: Tamxhwe in Modern Golok' (2009) 1 Asian Highland Perspectives 164
F Pirie, 'Legal Autonomy as Political Engagement: The Ladakhi Village in the Wider World' (2006) 40 Law and Society Review 77
F Pirie, 'Secular Morality, Village law, and Buddhism in Tibetan Societies' (2006) 12 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 173
F Pirie, 'Segmentation Within the State: The Reconfiguration of Tibetan Tribes in China's Reform Period' (2005) 9 Nomadic Peoples 83

Edited Book (4)

F Pirie and Judith Scheele (eds), Legalism: Community and Justice (OUP 2014)
F Pirie and Toni Huber (eds), Conflict and Social Order in Tibet and Inner Asia (Brill 2008)
Martijn van Beek and F Pirie (eds), Modern Ladakh: Continuity and Change in Anthropological Perspective (Brill 2008)
Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and F Pirie (eds), Order and Disorder: Anthropological Perspectives (Berghahn 2007)

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Research Interests

Anthropology of law; Tibetan law and legal practices; Global legal history; The English Bar

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