Vindicatory Justice

This volume offers a new theoretical approach to the analysis of the law/revenge binary, and attempts to dismantle the common idea of revenge as lacking any legal, moral or rational dimension. In contrast, the book puts forward a model of a complex system of justice—which it terms 'vindicatory'—wherein vendetta constitutes an authorized action, the core of which does not (just) lie in vengeance but also in settlement procedures for peace—or 'composition.' The first part of the book ("Vindicatory Justice: Conceptual Analyses and Forerunners") seeks to identify the nature of vindicatory justice and to shed light on the structure of so-called vindicatory systems. In turn, the second part ("Mapping Vindicatory Justice") illustrates, using examples gathered from a range of sociolegal contexts, the dynamic relationship between composition and authorized revenge in vindicatory systems. Taken as a whole, the volume shows that applying a longue durée historical perspective to the study of revenge systems allows us to clearly recognize composition and authorized revenge as features of the same legal system, even though one of them may seem predominant (or more eye-catching) than the other in certain cultural settings.

• Compositional Process
• Criminal Damages
• Housing Rights
• Indigenous Justice
• Institutional Revenge
• Moral and Legal Responsibility
• Restorative Justice
• Retaliation
• Revenge and Criminal Law
• Revenge and Law

• Department of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

  Raúl Márquez Porras, Ignasi Terradas Saborit

• Department of Legal Sciences ‘Cesare Beccaria’, Faculty of Law, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

  Riccardo Mazzola

Raúl Márquez Porras (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor in Legal anthropology at the University of Barcelona and coordinator of the Research Group on Legal Anthropology (Catalan Institute of Anthropology). He published the monograph Construir la propriedad. Las formas y usos del derecho en una ocupación de Salvador de Bahía (2013). Among his publications on vindicatory justice: Asserting their justice. The Shuar vindicatory system and the development of indigenous justice (2018) and Vindicatory Justice and the State: Accounts from Yolngu and Shuar ethnographies (with Riccardo Mazzola) (2020).

Riccardo Mazzola (Ph.D.) is a Researcher and Teaching Assistant in Legal philosophy and Sociology of law at the University of Milan and a former Visiting Researcher at the Australian National University. He published two monographs: Indigenous Intellectual Property: A Conceptual Analysis (2018) and Componere (2020), and the edited collectionVindicta (2019, with Paolo Di Lucia). Among his publications on vindicatory justice: Revenge and Law, Revenge as Law. Notes on the Anthropology of Vengeance (2017) and Terradas' Vindicatory Justice. An Attempt at Formalization (2021).

Ignasi Terradas Saborit (Ph.D.) is Professor of Anthropology of law at the University of Barcelona. He published seven monographs, including the groundbreaking Justicia vindicatoria (2008) and La justicia más antigua (2019), and the edited collections Antropología jurídica (1999), Antropología jurídica de la responsabilidad (2011) and Anthropology of Law. Legal Studies and Social Anthropology on an Equal Footing (Revista de Antropología Social, 2015). Among his publications on vindicatory justice: La etnografía del procedimiento vindicatorio (2016) and Sir Wilfried Grigson (1896-1948) Juez y Etnólogo (2017). He is currently investigating vindicatory justice as a substratum or criptotype in criminal law and jurisprudence.

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