The premier U.S. journal in the field of legal and political anthropology has moved to the University of Wisconsin from Cornell University. PoLAR:  Political and Legal Anthropology Review is now housed at the UW Law School’s Institute for Legal Studies, under the editorship of Elizabeth Mertz, the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law, who earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke University in addition to her J.D.  The journal is published by Wiley-Blackwell, and is the official publication of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. 

Mertz feels that PoLAR fits especially well into the community of scholars at UW. Professor Katherine Bowie of the UW Anthropology Department is serving as Book Review Editor; her research also combines law and anthropology, centering on political and legal controversies in Thailand.

Mertz and Bowie will be assisted by the journal’s Managing Editor, April Faith-Slaker, a 2007 graduate of the UW Law School and now a Ph.D. student pursuing advanced training in family policy studies.

“Professor Bowie and I are so excited to be working together on this journal, as anthropologists and as fellow members of the UW community,” Mertz comments.  “From my perspective, the University of Wisconsin Law School is unique in its history of engagement with the social sciences. While there are quite a few law schools that have shown interest in one or two of the social sciences, Wisconsin has always fostered expertise in the full range of social science knowledge – from quantitative to qualitative, economics to sociology to history, and the Department of Anthropology contains a strong core of scholars studying law and politics.  I can’t think of a better home for translating between law and anthropology.”  

Bowie comments, “PoLAR provides an interdisciplinary forum that makes it possible to keep up on the latest research on law and politics around the globe. It’s more directly focused on politics than other anthropology journals, which is exciting for those of us who specialize in this area.”

Scholars in the area of political and legal anthropology have expressed enthusiasm about the journal. Professor Sam Kaplan of Ben-Gurion University comments, "What a power team at Wisconsin!"

Oona Schmid, Director of Publishing at the American Anthropological Association, comments, “There has been a real awareness in recent decades that law is not exogenous to society, but is instead an integral part of human cultures. PoLAR has been at the forefront of that movement, providing a peer-reviewed space for the best of the research bridging ethnography and legal studies, ethics and culture, society and human rights. I’m proud of the trajectory that our journal has traveled since its inception in 1973, which Mertz’s fine editorship will continue.”

More information on PoLAR is available at: http://www.aaanet.org/sections/apla/polar.html    and

 http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=1081-6976

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