Practicing Ethnography in Law

"PRACTICING ETHNOGRAPHY IN LAW opens up to searching scrutiny the ways and means of legal anthropology. But it is much, much more than a primer on method or a textbook on technique. At once critically acute and creatively wide-ranging, the eleven essays--headed by an unusually thoughtful introduction--also interrogate the epistemic foundations and conceptual scaffolding of the comparative study of law. Drawing on a broad spectrum of ethnographic sites, and addressing an equally broad range of important theoretical and analytical questions, this volume is a must-read."
--John L. Comaroff, University of Chicago
"This cutting-edge collection of essays on legal ethnography is a fitting tribute to the memory of June Starr, as it does justice to her strongly-held concern about maintaining high methodological standards in legal anthropology. The essays are marked by a searching honesty, which doesn't shrink from acknowledging the dilemmas and compromises necessary to performing good ethnography in unsettling times and circumstances. With feet firmly planted in the time-honored requirements of in-depth ethnographic work, which are not always met by some professing to perform 'ethnography, ' these authors nonetheless also deal boldly with the variations, flexibility, and new ethical binds raised by a vigorous engagement with fieldwork and ethnography in today's world."
--Elizabeth Mertz, Professor, University of Wisconsin Law School