Marie-Claire Foblets is Director of the Department “Law & Anthropology” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle a/d Saale. She was trained in law at the universities of Antwerp (1977-1979) and Leuven (1979-1982) in Belgium, while at the same time receiving an education in Thomist philosophy. Thanks to a study fellowship (1982-1983), she was given the opportunity to pursue further study in philosophy at the Wilhelms-Universität of Münster, in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, and to complete her studies in social and cultural anthropology (1985). For more than twenty years Marie-Claire Foblets taught social and cultural anthropology in the universities of Antwerp and Brussels. Before becoming a member of the Max Planck Society in March 2012, she was ordinary professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, where she headed the Institute for Migration Law and Legal Anthropology. Among her manifold publications is the edited volume with A.D. Renteln and J.-F. Gaudreault-DesBiens, Cultural Diversity and the Law. State Responses from Around the World, Brussels/Montréal, Bruylant/Blois (2010).