Reckoning with Law—and with Legal Anthropology

I recently experienced one of those unsettling, context-imposing moments that cause the ground underfoot to feel suddenly loose, threatening to dissolve into quicksand – until, that is, the moment passes, as it inevitably seems to do. It happened during a university-wide lecture by Mark Williams, a professor of palaeontology at the University of Leicester and the Palaeontological Association's ‘exceptional lecturer’ for the academic year 2022–2023. This means he was chosen to go on a global tour of universities to give a talk for wider audiences that was intended to show the relevance and importance of palaeontology for questions of global significance. The title of Williams's lecture was ‘The Anthropocene: Planetary Scale Change to the Biosphere and the Future Well-Being of Planet Earth’.