Interviewers: Monika Dommann, Kijan Espahangizi

Lauren A. Benton is one of the most innovative contemporary researchers working in the field of legal history. Since July 2015, she is professor of history and law and the dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Previously, she held a position at NYU in the department of history. She has drawn the material for her studies, to large extent, from the Early Modern, Atlantic world: mainly from the writings of colonial legal scholars, in particular their studies of the legal status of the open sea, the slave trade, and the mountains of paper produced during the colonial period documenting the paradoxical situation of subaltern governors. Consequently, her understanding of law as a zone of contact and conflict is enlightening for those undertaking a post-colonial analysis of the globalized world. We met with Lauren Benton for an extensive interview on occasion of a public talk she held in December 2014 at the Center »History of Knowledge« (ETH and University of Zurich).

Dommann: Can you tell us a few things about your intellectual biography? What did you study? And what led you to your current interests?

Benton: That’s a long story because it involves a radical shift in what I was doing at first. I did my PhD in anthropology and history but worked mostly with sociologists on the study of migration. I wrote my dissertation on the informal sector, in particular on people working off the books in Spain, and this was post Franco Spain in the 1980’s, so it was not a terribly historical project although there was some history in it, of course. It was a good project to do, I enjoyed it, and I got interested in law while I was doing it because one of the things I found was that people who work in the underground economy were using a lot of the regulatory frameworks of the formal economy, and so I began to get interested in legal pluralism through that route.

But when I finished the dissertation and then the book, I realized that my heart was with history and that the big questions I wanted to consider were historical questions. So the reason why it was such a radical shift was that this in fact required leaving a very good university post, a faculty position at MIT. At that...