PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review’s 2015 virtual edition offers an anthropological take on the Law and Society Association (LSA) annual meeting theme: Law’s Promise and Law’s Pathos in the Global North and Global South. The LSA conference explores the following questions: What has law accomplished in the Global North and Global South? What are the tradeoffs and consequences of its pursuits?

The eight articles and postscripts that comprise the virtual issue offer important and ethnographically informed insight into the tensions that emerge through and around legal interventions. In bringing together case studies from across the globe, the issue provides analyses of historical, contextual, and contemporary relations of power that inform the different formations of law and politics studied in each article.

All articles featured in the virtual edition are free to access through the end of 2015.