PSU Anthropology Department

Phi Beta Kappa, Sociology and Anthropology, the Anthropology Club, and Political Science invite you to attend the following public lecture.

Citizens United/ Citizens Divided:
A Case Study in the Anthropology of Law
Carol Greenhouse
Princeton University

Monday, March 14 5:00pm

102 JR Howard Hall
This lecture offers a cultural analysis of the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case, Citizens United. The legal controversies surrounding this case concerned the role of corporations in federal elections. For the public, though, it is less the technicalities of election law that have drawn attention; rather, it is the Court’s formulation of corporations as persons. In this sense, the Court dealt with fundamental social and cultural questions: What is a group? What is a corporation? What is the public interest in democracy? What is the meaning of money in politics? The lecture examines the ways in which the Court posed such questions, implicitly and explicitly, thereby carrying the significance of the case beyond electioneering to the role of law in everyday life.

CAROL GREENHOUSE, sociocultural anthropologist, is the Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and president of the American Ethnological Society. She has written on law as a cultural idea in the U.S. in Praying for Justice and has worked on comparative problems related to law’s cultural legitimacy in A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics Across Cultures and The Paradox of Relevance, on ethnography and citizenship in the U.S.