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21 Yale J.L. & Human. 101 (2009)
Outsourcing Sacrifice: The Labor of Private Military Contractors

handle is hein.journals/yallh21 and id is 107 raw text is: Outsourcing Sacrifice: The Labor of Private Military Contractors Mateo Taussig-Rubbo* Numerous scandals arising from the United States government's increased use of armed private military contractors have drawn attention to the contractors' legally ill-defined position. But the complexity of the contractors' relation to various bodies of law and doctrine-including military law, international law, state tort law, employment law, and sovereign immunity-is not the only salient issue. The contractors are also awkwardly positioned in relation to the traditional understanding of sacrifice, which has structured Americans' imaginings about those who kill and are killed on behalf of the nation. In this understanding, there is a mutually constitutive relationship between citizenship and sacrifice. This Article examines the contractors' relation to the tradition of sacrifice and finds that they are officially excluded from it-their deaths are not included in body counts, for instance, and they are not given medals and honors. It construes the emergence of the contractor as an effort by U.S. officials to avoid the political liability entailed in calling a loss a sacrifice and discusses the way in which the legal form of contract and the policy of privatization have been means through which this is attempted. The Article then focuses on one case in which this effort ran into difficulties: the spectacular and grotesque killing, dismembering and immolation of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah, Iraq. In this event, individuals who had contracted their services came to be seen as having sacrificed for the U.S. In conclusion, the Article urges that while it is important to address the lack of legal clarity surrounding contractors, it is also necessary to address their position in the tradition of sacrifice and attend to the deeper issues of popular and governmental sovereignty which that tradition articulates. * Associate Professor, University at Buffalo Law School, State University of New York, J.D. (Yale), Ph.D. (Chicago). This paper was presented at a Summer Institute for the Humanities workshop organized by Paul Kahn and Ulrich Haltem held at Yale Law School; at a workshop on Religion and the Social organized by Danilyn Rutherford and Hussein Agrama at the University of Chicago; at the American Anthropological Association annual meetings as part of a panel I co-organized on sacrifice and sovereignty; at a seminar on art and labor at University of London, Goldsmiths College, Department of Anthropology, organized by Roger Sansi-Roca and David Graeber; at the Center for Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City of New York; and at a faculty workshop at the University at Buffalo Law School. I am grateful to the participants at those events, and for comments by Bruce Ackerman, Guyora Binder, Bruce Grant, Keith Hart, Paul Kahn, Fred Konevsky, Marshall Sahlins, Ann Stoler, Winnifred Sullivan, Hylton White, Jim Wooten, and Amiel Melnick.

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