Sally Falk Moore

Sally Falk Moore (January 18, 1924 – May 2, 2021) was a legal anthropologist and professor emerita at Harvard University.

Quotes about Sally Falk Moore

• Sally was an elegant woman: a classical beauty and with exquisite manners. Given the challenges of being a woman of her generation in the legal world and in academia — someone hard-nosed, strong-willed, and determined — it would be unfortunate if she went down into history as delicate.
  • Kristin Bergtora Sandvik [1]

• When I came to Harvard Law School from Ethiopia, I never thought that I would find someone with first-hand knowledge of life in a village of East Africa. Our first conversations were like conversations with someone who had left my village a little earlier than me and just needed a little updating on how things have stood since then.
  • Mekkonen Firew Ayano [2]

• Sally’s work in legal anthropology was anchored in the idea of social life as process, the idea that social orders are never whole, never complete, always multiple, always under construction, and always being altered, undone, and remade. Sally understood law as, essentially, social projects to fix the present or form the future, and she understood that, whatever the range and variety of laws’ effects, laws would never wholly fix the present or form the future. By studying these social projects over time, using tools of ethnography and history, she showed, we can learn both about the realities of law and, also, about the larger social processes in which legal efforts are embedded. Sally was remarkable for combining a sensitive, finely tuned sense of the utter complexity and, to some extent, unknowability of social life with a supreme and infectious confidence in our ability to actually gain some real understanding of social life; as she put it: “[T]he question must be asked”. It’s hard not to think that a key reason that Sally’s questions, concepts, methods - the sheer power of her thinking - remain so sharp and vital is because they were forged in relation to the ongoing tumult of the world in various key locales (New York City, Wall St, Nuremberg, Kilimanjaro) rather in relation to the various academic contests of the times. This is not to say that she did not situate her work within those academic contests; she painstakingly analyzed massive bodies of work in anthropology and law alongside the presentation of her own ideas. But she had been a Wall Street lawyer at 21 (learning what lawyers do to serve commercial interests and wealth) and a Nuremberg prosecutor at 22 (delving into the business files of the company that manufactured the gas used in the genocide).
  • Sarah P. Robinson [3]

• You (Sally Falk Moore) demonstrated that seeking to think well is a quality of life issue, and that intellectual honesty is an essential form of courage and a basic human need. You expressed this beautifully in the paper, “Some Political Trials in Africa”. It was about human rights lawyers bringing cases they thought they would probably lose. They wanted to leave a record for the future, to say: “We were here, we cared, and we tried.”
  • Liisa Malkki, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University [4]

• As a lawyer in the Nuremburg trials, she worked on the prosecution of senior industrialists who contributed to the Nazi war effort. She asked for that assignment because she thought they must have had more choice in what they did than many others in Nazi Germany. It was hard to respond adequately to the horrors of Holocaust and war by blaming either individuals or a country. Those on whom she focused as a prosecutor led the corporate giant IG Farben, employer of slave labor and manufacturer of the gas used in concentration camps. Her investigations were impeded by the firm and by an American officer who didn’t believe in prosecuting industrialists. What Sally took home from her Nuremburg experience was a lesson in the ways power and property impinged informally on the formal workings of the law.
• Her recognition that the personal was political was intuitive and preceded the feminist motto.
• I remember telling her I thought psychedelic drugs would transform society. Wrong pill, she suggested. Contraceptives would matter more.
  • Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences, ASU [5]

• She was warning me that the persuasiveness of one’s writing should not deflect or disguise leaps in logic and/or insufficient evidence.
  • Kathleen M. Gallagher [6]