This work explores how men and women invoke law in their struggles to resist gender, racial, ethnic, religious and class-based domination. The essays in this collection demonstrate people's capacity to re-work the content, meaning and processes of law. The essays, written by anthropologists and historians, detail the historical and ethnographic contexts of: colonial and post-colonial courts in Kenya, India, Uganda, and the Caribbean; bureaucracies in Tonga and Turkey; and judicial processes in the US. It argues that while states encode and enforce law, a crucial part of the power of law is its very contestability.
