This article combines perspectives from linguistic anthropology and outsider scholarship to examine the academic discourses of law and anthropology. Inclusion of outsider scholarship is not only an issue of politics and ethics within the academy, but also a crucial corrective to limited epistemologies, ontologies, and methods within standard Eurocentric forms of analysis. We begin in Sections 1 and 2 with an overview of relevant scholarly foundations, and then consider in Section 3 the persistent conceptual division between formal law and law in action, long questioned in legal and anthropological thinking. To move the discussion further, Section 4 excavates underlying legal metapragmatic assumptions using the example of the “depublication” of legal precedents. Section 5 examines the New Legal Realist movement as another case of attention to metalinguistic norms undergirding translation between law and social sciences. We conclude in Section 6 that the most promising places for conversations between law and anthropology are at marginalized but cutting-edge spaces.
