Thinking about (environmental) law in (South) Africa

This article takes its cue from the work of Étienne Le Roy, who recently passed away. It relies on a modality of work among legal anthropologists that is often overlooked. By highlighting a practice that is still marginal in law, based on my own career as a jurist, the paper takes into account “what the field does to the law,” as well as the acuity of the anthropology of law in highlighting the ruptures and continuities in the relationship with nature, which was first instrumentalized for the benefit of the segregationist project, before becoming a tool for national and regional reconciliation in South and southern Africa.