Legal Ethnographies and Ethnographic Law

• Author: Susan Bibler Coutin and Véronique Fortin
• Pages: 71-84

The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction

Ethnographies have been central to law and society since the field came into being.

They provide insight into the workings of law on the ground, the consciousnesses

of legal actors, the routine practices of legal institutions, the impacts of law in the

lives of marginalized groups, the nature of legal advocacy, and the differences

between law’s claims and its realities, all of which have been key to seeing law as a

social phenomenon rather than merely as doctrine. While interviews and partici-

pant observation have been considered the hallmarks of ethnographic inquiry and

while definitions of ethnography vary by discipline, we contend that, more than a

research method, ethnography is a way of seeing, a type of account dedicated to

representing and explicating social and cultural realities that may be encountered

in multiple ways.

The recent rise of Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) suggests that there is renewed

interest in deploying social science methods to understand law, but, to date, this

interest has privileged quantitative approaches. There is therefore an opportunity to

restate the contributions that ethnographic approaches can make to the analysis of

law’s empirical realities. We suggest that these are threefold. First, ethnography can

destabilize taken‐for‐granted definitions of law, thus revealing the multiple ways

that law is understood and practiced. Second, when it takes an “engaged” form, eth-

nography can overcome the division between the normative nature of formal legal

analysis and the disinterested or objective stance adopted in much social science

research. Third, 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 and deploy

Legal Ethnographies and

Ethnographic Law

Susan Bibler Coutin and Véronique Fortin

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