Sally Falk Moore

Sally Falk Moore was an American legal anthropologist, born in 1924, who worked as a Wall Street lawyer and as a staff attorney investigating Nazi war crimes for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg before earning a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University in 1957. She joined Harvard University's faculty in 1981, later serving as dean of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, after earlier teaching at the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale. Her long-term fieldwork on customary law among the Chagga people of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, presented in Social Facts and Fabrications: Customary Law on Kilimanjaro (1986), developed her influential concept of the semi-autonomous social field, a social space with its own internal rules that is nonetheless shaped by external pressures, and her broader approach treated law as a dynamic process rather than a fixed body of rules, set out in Law as Process (1978). She died in 2021.