Legal Ethnographies and Ethnographic Law

Abstract

Ethnographies have been central to law and society since field came into being. The recent rise of Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) suggests that there is renewed interest in deploying social science methods to understand law, but this interest has privileged quantitative approaches. There is an opportunity to restate contributions that ethnographic approaches can make to analysis of law's empirical realities. This chapter describes that these are threefold; (i) ethnography can destabilize taken-for-granted definitions of law, revealing multiple ways that law is understood and practiced; (ii) when it takes an “engaged” form, ethnography can overcome division between normative nature of formal legal analysis and the disinterested or objective stance adopted in much social science research; and (iii) there are potentially productive intersections between legal and ethnographic practices. Both ethnographers and legal practitioners question people, take notes on conversations, produce narrative accounts, and assemble documentary records as evidence of particular claims.

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