Sally Falk Moore

Sally Falk Moore (born 1924) is a legal anthropologist and Professor Emerita from Harvard University. She did her fieldwork in Tanzania and has published extensively on cross-cultural, comparative legal theory.

Moore was trained as a lawyer and, after working on Wall Street, became a staff attorney at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg during the investigatin of Nazi war criminals. [http://www.law.harvard.edu/conferences/nuremberg_legacies/falkmoorebio.php] She then returned to the US and received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. She was chair of the department at the University of Southern California (1963-1977) and a professor at University of California at Los Angeles and Yale University before she became joining the Harvard University faculty in 1981.

A recurrent theme in her work is that neither law nor culture can be reduced to any simple system of rules from which practices can be deduced. Instead, there always exists, even in apparently simple, illiterate societies, a plurality of legal/customary rules and it is their interaction with an equally complex social word that determines how these laws function in practice. She has explored these ideas in fieldwork-based studies of Tanzanizan and Incan cultures, and also in US in various contexts such as constitutional law, and business law in Silicon Valley.

Major Publications

*"Power and Property in Inca Peru". Morningside Heights, New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.
*"Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology: Cases and Questions". With Barbara G. Myerhoff, Cornell University Press, 1975. ISBN 0-8014-9157-6
*"The Chagga and Meru of Tanzania" (Ethnographic survey of Africa : East Central Africa). International African Institute, 1977. ISBN 0-85302-051-5
*"Law As Process: An Anthropological Approach" London ; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1978. ISBN 0-7100-8758-6
*"Social Facts and Fabrications : "Customary" Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980" (Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures). Cambridge University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-521-31201-9
*"Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene". Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 1994. ISBN 0-8139-1505-8
*"Law and Anthropology: A Reader", (edited), Blackwell, 2004. ISBN 1-4051-0228-4
*"Lucan", Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, 1987. ISBN 0-283-99536-X
*"Moralizing States and the Ethnography of the Present". American Anthropological Association, 1993. ISBN 0-913167-60-6
*"The Silicon Empire: Law, Culture And Commerce". With Michael B. Likosky. Ashgate Publishing 2005. ISBN 0-7546-2457-9

Awards

*Guggenheim, 1995-1996
*Huxley Memorial Medalist and Lecturer for 1999, by the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. She was only the second woman so honored. [http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/11.11/moore.html]
*Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize, 2005 [http://www.lawandsociety.org/prizes/kalven_prize.htm]

External links

* [http://madkenyanwoman.blogspot.com/2005/11/of-prepositions-and-propositions.html Critique of Moore in "Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman"]