I started this Web site in 2003 to fill a perceived need in the anthropological and legal communities for a central location to catalog sources relating to both topics. First as an anthropology graduate student, I found it virtually impossible to locate secondary (and even sometimes primary) legal sources relating to the research that I was doing. Later as a law student, I realized that there was a surprisingly vast amount of sources about anthropology and the law in largely inaccessible formats for social scientists. I say that they are inaccessible, because they are often not searchable via the standard social science source search systems (Dissertation Abstracts, Web of Science, etc.). Additionally, I noticed that in the legal sources that I was reading, there was often a lack of citations to peer reviewed articles on factual anthropological information. Again, I believe that this is due to the absence of such sources from the legal source databases such as WestLaw and Lexis-Nexis. Therefore, I have undertaken a project (this site) to centrally catalog sources (laws, cases, books, articles, conference presentations, etc.) on issues of anthropology and the law. One type of source that you, generally, will not find on this site is newspaper articles. Due to the typical absence of peer review (either in the scientific or legal sense) that accompanies these sources and due to the overabundance of them, I have chosen not to include them in the bibliographies on this site. For such sources, the user is directed to such search databases as Lexis-Nexis (the nonlegal version), to which most university libraries subscribe. I have in some cases, however, included non-peer reviewed magazine articles where I felt that they were particularly relevant. In addition to cataloging sources that cover topics related to anthropology and the law, I have also included some citations to overview materials on some of the subjects. The purpose of this is to help the legal scholars to locate basic sources on the science that they are researching.
This is a work in progress and I do it in my spare time, so please bear with its progress. The site is not funded from any source besides myself, personally. So updates sometimes must take a back seat to my regular work.
It will be abundantly obvious that my original research projects that led to the realizations discussed above were NAGPRA-related projects, as those will be the most extensive bibliographies during the early stages of this site. As for tracking down actual hard copies of the articles, I suggest using your library's interlibrary borrowing service. If anyone wants to submit hard copies of conference papers to me to store here (along with appropriate copyright waivers to allow me to provide copies to other researchers), please feel free to contact me.
Finally, I am only human, so please excuse any errors or omissions from the lists. Also, the sources are compiled as I do my own research on subject areas, so please excuse preferences of one area over another from time to time. If you see a problem or wish to submit a source that I have not listed, please fill out one of the forms for submissions/errors whose links are at the bottom of each page and I will update the site accordingly.
Ryan M. Seidemann