Ethnography is a research method which is used as a basis for understanding social relations and the cultural diversity of everyday life. Because of its usefulness and centrality in understanding the social world, ethnography is a key method of understanding in many fields of study, especially including the study of law, lawyers, and legal institutions. This course focused primarily on the study of legal ethnography, exploring how the law transforms, how lay people think about and use law, how legal organizations operate, and how the law may reinforce inequality.
Key readings in the course included Heather Hlavka & Sameena Mulla’s 2021 “Bodies in Evidence”, John Flood’s “What Do Lawyers Do?”, Sally Engle Merry’s 1999 Colonizing Hawai’i, Cheesman’s Rule-of Law Ethnography, Wilson’s Digital Ethnography of Law, French’s Ethnography in Ordinary Case Law, Latour’s “The Making of Law”, and Conley & Barr’s classic “Fundamentals of Jurisprudence”. In addition to the syllabus, I also make available detailed reading discussion guides for each of the assigned reading.
This course provides an excellent counterpoint to the case law method. Different from legal anthropology courses, this course is designed for graduate law students who may benefit not only from the intellectual and analytical focus of the course materials, but the practical orientations of observation, sense-making and change-making in the legal field as well.
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I first taught this legal ethnography course for law students in Spring 2024. The course was well-received, and students felt that seeing the law “in context” was incredibly important for them as they transitioned from law school into their career as attorneys. During field notes exercises, students were also able to gain insight into the practice of law and of law schools by adopting the orientation of “observer”. The varied methodologies, personalities, and orientations of the ethnographic readings assigned for the course were helpful to them. The course also confirmed for them some of their intuitions about the law but, under the case law method, were not discussed or were discounted in earlier course experiences.
Although I believe this course could be taught in other formats, it is designed to be a course that meets once per week for a period of two hours. Students were evaluated in this course by an in-class presentation on assigned reading (10%), a paper proposal (10%), a final topic presentation (10%), ethnographic field notes based on their own observations (20%) and a 20-page final paper (50%) due at the end of the semester.
Download Syllabus & Reading Discussion Guides.
LEGAL ETHNOGRAPHY - Syllabus & Discussion Guides - Prof. Lisa Lucile Owens