Socio-legal Frameworks: An Anthropological Analysis of Sociocultural Influences on Proposed Arrangements for International Administration of the Arctic

The legal infrastructures of nations are built on sociocultural attitudes regarding the function, purpose, appropriate sources, and means of conceptualizing law. The discipline of legal anthropology aims to study conceptions of law cross-culturally. This study aims to understand the systems of social attitudes toward law which serve in constructing the socio-legal frameworks on which legal traditions and the types of legal institutions they beget are based. This examination is made through a case study of the ongoing formation of intergovernmental administrative infrastructure in the Arctic, through the lenses of three of its most influential stakeholders. By analyzing the actions of the governments of Canada, the United States, and the Russian Federation in regards to ratification of multilateral administrative instruments, such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, rationales surrounding the implementation of a bilateral treaty to ameliorate Arctic disputes, as well as other tactics used to resolve said disputes, this study hopes to understand how sociocultural attitudes drive the formation of legal institutions. Analysis of the sociocultural attitudes which inform domestic and intergovernmental legal institutions will be done through historical examination of the legal traditions that underpin the standing legal institutions of each of these three states. This examination has demonstrated that Canada and the United States, which are members of the common law legal tradition, that prioritizes use of established precedent in legal decision making, appear more reticent to ratify measures of international law in the Arctic, which do not have substantial precedent. Meanwhile, the Russian Federation, which is rooted in the civil law tradition, which primarily utilizes direct application of legislative enactments and legal scholarship as its means of determining legal action, has ratified and implemented measures on the solely principles of international law in the Arctic more readily.