Journal of Legal Anthropology

When Kailash Upreti's father in the tiny village of Panchawari, located in the hilly region of Uttarakhand in India, did not receive the Rs. 250 he had lent to his co-worker in good faith and with trust, he had felt cheated. He had sought the intervention of the goddess Bhagwati, a local divine feminine deity who was worshipped in situations of injustice. More than forty-five years later, the son of this co-worker reached out to Kailash Upreti with a request to be able to visit his father and return this money. ‘In the court of Bhagwati there may be a delay, but there is no darkness (devi ke darbar main der hain, par andher nahi). She will always ensure justice (nyāy),’ narrated Kailash as he explained the significance of deities of justice (nyāy-ke-devtā) in the legal landscape of Kumaon Uttarakhand.

This article explores the meanings of ritualistic practices in the contexts of societal orders and conflict resolution in the Kumaon Himalayas. Drawing on empirical work, I present local narratives and experiences with esoteric practices that connect human bodies and nature, bringing them into one continual whole. I examine the meanings rituals lend to concepts of justice to elaborate on a grounded description of justice in this particular South Asian context that enables an experience akin to healing and that thrives in the dynamics of uncertainty.

This article illuminates the tension between particularist moral cultural systems and the universal ethics of positivist laws through a detailed ethnography of Puerto Rican brujería (witchcraft-healing) practices. As an Afro-Latino religious practice that combines folk Catholicism, African-based religions, and the moral teachings of Kardecean Spiritism, contemporary Puerto Rican offers a moral compass and sense of justice aligned with its ‘spiritual laws’. These comply, adapt, but sometimes also supersede ‘human-made laws’. In this sense, brujería does not challenge mainstream society and its laws. Rather, the cosmic judgements that enlightened spirits transmit to brujos in trance take into account the spiritual significance of past, present and future implications of conflicts with the law, the welfare state, and work-family relations. While brujería works within the hegemonic legal system, it twists that system to fit its own moral economy, combining material and spiritual blessings and prosperity in its alternative cosmic justice and verdict.

This article examines how Brazil's Valley of the Dawn religious movement created an innovative ritual practice called the prisão (prison) that adapts elements of state legal systems while operating within a fundamentally different understanding of justice. Drawing on ethnographic data, I demonstrate how this ritual incorporates familiar aspects of state legal proceedings – formal roles, staged testimony, and ritualised judgements – and reframes them through spiritual concepts of karma, reincarnation, metaphysical debt, healing, and redemption. Rather than replacing or opposing formal state justice systems, the prison ritual operates alongside them, addressing spiritual and communal dimensions of harm and reconciliation that lie beyond the scope of conventional legal processes. Through analysis of participants’ experiences, I argue that this ‘spiritual justice system’ demonstrates how procedural borrowing from state institutions can transform familiar legal forms into vehicles for converting adversarial proceedings designed to establish guilt into collaborative processes aimed at spiritual reconciliation and community healing.

Divination is one of the most common means to deal with the personal, social, and legal problems faced in daily life in Senegal and the Gambia. Spirits are often seen as the source of divinatory knowledge and enunciations, and thus of the ritual measures indicated by diviners in order to enable positive predictions after a consultation. A primary ritual remedy consists of donating food or other objects as per indications of the diviner. In Senegal, the Mandinka term for this practice is sadaa, and in Wolof sarax, both derived from the Arabic term sadaqa. Drawing on the ethnography of divination and its ritual remedies, this article analyses how divinatory rituals provide an important means to bypass state intervention in grievance redressal through the constitution of a ritual sociality that serves to counteract the spaces of exclusion and marginalisation associated with the state and the spheres of officialdom.

Designed to deliver justice for all, legal systems frequently deliver injustice. There are many examples of unfairness in judicial systems. It is common knowledge that prisons are filled with inmates who cannot afford to hire high-priced defence attorneys. By the same token, wealthy men and women often break the law with abandon, confident that their ‘privilege’ protects them from legal judgements that might result in social humiliation or, worse yet, time in prison. Such preferential treatment tends to erode the average person's ‘social trust’ both in legal systems and the formal institutions of government. According to the results of a recent Pew Research Center survey (2025: 2), rates of social trust in the United States declined from 46 per cent in 1972 to 34 per cent in 2018. The survey probed two major subjects: degrees of interpersonal trust and measures of trust in formal institutions. ‘Higher trust’, according to the results of the survey, ‘is associated with better-functioning democratic institutions’ (2025: 6).