CIVIL RIGHTS
Rice, Douglas. Lighting the Way: Federal Courts, Civil Rights, and Public Policy. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 156. $39.50 cloth.
Drawing on new data on the policy focuses of US federal courts, Rice examines the interactive nature of policymaking and the role of legal institutions and social movements in shaping policy agendas. He finds that the Supreme Court and other federal courts play a key role in systematically leading the attention of other institutions on civil rights.
Schmidt, Christopher W. Civil Rights in America: A History. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. ix + 215. $34.99 paper.
Schmidt argues that the term “civil rights” has such a familiar presence in discussions about US politics and law that it is used reflexively and intuitively, without thinking specifically about what is covered by the term. In his review of the meaning of civil rights from the Civil War through today, he finds that, through their struggles over what it means to live in a nation dedicated to protecting civil rights, each generation has given the label new life and new meaning. This challenges recent efforts by historians to reframe the struggle for racial equality as an unbroken “long civil rights movement.”
CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY AND HISTORY
Thornhill, Christopher. Democratic Crisis and Global Constitutional Law. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 269. $36.99 paper.
Thornhill proposes a sociological framework for understanding democracy and its constitutional preconditions, stressing the link between classical patterns of democratic citizenship and military processes and arguing that democratic stability at the national level relies on the formation of robust normative systems at the international level. On this basis, he argues that democracy is frequently exposed to crisis because the normative terms in which it is promoted and justified tend to simplify its nature, creating a space in which anti-democratic movements, typically with a populist emphasis, can take shape and flourish.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND SOCIAL CONTROL
Berlin, Mark S. Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws against International Crimes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv + 250. $85.00 cloth.
Berlin examines the global spread of national criminal laws against atrocity crimes—genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Drawing on a variety of sources, including original data, he finds that in many cases, criminalization has not been the result of concerted government initiative, but of inconspicuous choices made by technocratic legal experts—especially influential European criminal law scholars—who have been delegated authority to draft large-scale reforms to countries’ national criminal codes. These ideas have then diffused via professional communities that deem them to be important features of a “modern” criminal code.
Binnall, James M. Twenty Million Angry Men: The Case for Including Convicted Felons in Our Jury System. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. x + 275. $29.95 paper.
Today, all but one US jurisdiction restricts a convicted felon’s eligibility for jury service. In a research-based argument, Binnall challenges the professed rationales for felon-juror exclusion and highlights the benefits of inclusion as they relate to criminal desistance at the individual and community levels. He concludes that when it comes to serving as a juror, a history of involvement in the criminal justice system is an asset, not a liability.
Boyd, Christina L., Nelson, Michael J., Ostrander, Ian, and Boldt, Ethan D.. The Politics of Federal Prosecution. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. viii + 240. $99.00 cloth.
Boyd, Nelson, Ostrander, and Boldt draw upon thirty years of data to examine the interplay of political factors and prosecution by US federal attorneys, and conclude that politics affects their behavior at nearly every stage of service. They find that congressional and presidential politics affect who becomes federal prosecutors and how long they serve, and that signals of presidential and congressional preferences—along with local priorities—affect key prosecutorial decisions: whether to bring prosecutions, how to approach plea bargaining negotiations, and when to use criminal asset forfeiture.
Currie, Elliott. A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2020. Pp. v + 276. $27.99 cloth.
Currie focuses on the pervasive violence experienced by Black communities in the US—violence takes more years of life from Black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined; even Black women suffer violent death at a higher rate than white men—and argues that this is a direct result of the continuing social and economic marginalization. He concludes that these conditions help perpetuate a level of preventable trauma and needless suffering that has no counterpart anywhere in the developed world, and need to be directly addressed.
Garrett, Brandon L. Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. ii + 252. $29.95 cloth.
Garrett catalogs the sources of error and the faulty science behind a range of well-known forensic evidence in the US, from fingerprints and firearms to forensic algorithms. He asks: Where are the studies that validate the basic premises of widely accepted techniques such as fingerprinting? Where is the quality control in the laboratories and at the crime scenes? Should we so readily adopt powerful new technologies like facial recognition software and rapid DNA machines? And why do judges resist evidence of the weaknesses of long-accepted methods?
Gribaldo, Alessandra. Unexpected Subjects: Intimate Partner Violence, Testimony, and the Law. Chicago, IL: Hau Books, 2020. Pp. x + 148. $20.00 paper.
This book is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. Using Italy as an illustrative case, Gribaldo focuses on women’s practices of resistance and the elicitation of intelligible subjectivities, and explores the problematic encounter between the need to speak, the entanglement of violence and intimacy, and the way the law approaches domestic violence. She analyzes dynamics that create the victim-subject, shedding light on how the Italian legal system reproduces broader conditions of violence against women.
Ross, Josephine. A Feminist Critique of Police Stops. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii + 229. $29.99 paper.
Drawing on a wide range of sources—including her law students’ experiences with police, news stories about Eric Garner and Sandra Bland, and social science, Ross examines the parallels between US stop-and-frisk policing and sexual harassment. Building on feminist principles, she concludes that the Supreme Court got it wrong when it allowed police to stop, search, and sometimes strip-search people under the guise of consent.
Schrader, Stuart. Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 416. $29.95 paper.
Schrader argues that in the 1950s and 60s, the US projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance, and that this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records—from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines—he finds that police leaders envisioned their beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency.
CRITICAL LEGAL THEORY
Christodoulidis, Emilios, Dukes, Ruth, and Goldoni, Marco, eds. Research Handbook on Critical Legal Theory. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019. Pp. xi + 533. $69.95 paper.
Contributors to Christodoulidis, Dukes, and Goldoni’s handbook track the origins and development of critical legal theory along its European and North American trajectories, and connect the development of legal theory with other currents of critical thought including feminism, Marxism, critical race theory, varieties of postmodernism, as well as the various “turns” (ethical, aesthetic, political) of critical legal theory. They also examine particular legal disciplines—including labor, criminal, and intellectual property law—exploring what critical approaches reveal about opportunities for social transformation.
HOLOCAUST TRIALS
Kornbluth, Andrew. The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 332. $45.00 cloth.
After the defeat of the Nazis, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade. Kornbluth reconstructs the story of these trials and finds that, while they started out as a genuine search for truth, as the process revealed evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the past that could unify the nation.
HANDBOOKS ON LAW AND SOCIETY
Přibáň, Jiří, ed. Research Handbook on the Sociology of Law. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2020. Pp. x + 394. $260.00 cloth.
Contributors to Přibáň’s handbook map the historical, theoretical, and methodological concepts in sociology of law, and argue that the field flourishes due to its strong capacity for interdisciplinary engagement and links to other scientific concepts, methodologies, and research fields. Reflecting on recent publications in law and society, sociolegal studies, and interdisciplinary law research, contributors cover such themes as inequality and discrimination, crime and punishment, and social justice.
Talesh, Shauhin, Mertz, Elizabeth, and Klug, Heinz, eds. Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021. Pp. xiv + 519. $305 cloth, $65.00 eBook.
Contributors to Talesh, Mertz, and Klug’s handbook provide a comprehensive overview of the New Legal Realism (NLR) movement, drawing on deep roots within the law-and-society tradition and seeking to reach beyond historical and national boundaries to form new conversations. Contributions cover a variety of topics, including immigration, policing, globalization, legal education, and access to justice; examine how different social science disciplines intersect with NLR; and address the challenges of translation between social science and law.
HUMAN RIGHTS
Cliquennois, Gaëtan. European Human Rights Justice and Privatisation: The Growing Influence of Foreign Private Funds. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 290. $110 cloth.
Cliquennois argues that foreign private foundations and donors have increasingly become part of the European human rights justice system, creating their own litigation teams, funding NGOs litigating the European Courts, and contributing to the content and supervision of the European judgements. He analyzes the effect of this private influence on relations between states, with a focus on the direct and indirect threat of on the independence of courts and the protection of human rights in Europe.
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS DISPUTING
Perrone, Nicolás M. Investment Treaties and the Legal Imagination: How Foreign Investors Play by Their Own Rules. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xx + 242. $99.00 cloth.
Perrone argues that the advantages held by foreign investors in disputes with states are not the result of unpredicted arbitral interpretations, but rather the outcome of a world-making project realized by a coalition of business leaders, bankers, and their lawyers in the 1950s and 1960s. These leaders and lawyers not only set up a dispute settlement mechanism, but also created a platform to ground their vision of foreign investment relations into the practice of investor-state dispute settlement.
JUDGES AND JUDGING
Bonica, Adam, and Sen, Maya. The Judicial Tug of War: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xvi + 314. $39.99 cloth.
Bonica and Sen propose a framework for thinking about “the judicial tug of war” between liberals and conservatives in the US, seeking to explain current political clashes over courts and predict the composition of courts moving forward. Drawing on quantitative analyses, they find that an ideological rift between politicians and legal elites leads politicians to adopt measures that put ideology and politics front and center—for example, judicial elections—but that ideological closeness between politicians and the legal establishment allows legal elites to retain significant influence on the selection of judges.
Dancey, Logan, Nelson, Kjersten R., and Ringsmuth, Eve M.. It’s Not Personal: Politics and Policy in Lower Court Confirmation Hearings. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 198. $70.00 cloth.
To uncover why the US Senate holds confirmation hearings for lower federal court nominees and the value of these proceedings more generally, Dancey, Nelson, and Ringsmuth analyzed transcripts for all district and circuit court confirmation hearings between 1993 and 2012. They find that the time-consuming practice of confirmation hearings provides an important venue for senators to advocate on behalf of their policy preferences and bolster their chances of being reelected.
Moran, Leslie J. Law, Judges and Visual Culture. New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. Pp. xii + 245. $160.00 cloth.
Drawing upon a wide range of scholarship—including law, art history, film and television studies, and social and cultural studies—and interviews with a variety of practitioners, painters, photographers, television writers and producers, court communication staff, and judges, Moran examines how pictures have been used to make, manage, and circulate ideas about the judiciary since the sixteenth century. He examines what appears within the frame of these images, explores the impact that the technologies and the media industries that produce them have upon the way we engage with them, and assesses the experiences and meanings they generate.
Peppers, Todd C., ed., Of Courtiers and Princes: Stories of Lower Court Clerks and Their Judges. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 326. $39.95 cloth, eBook.
Drawing on contributions from former law clerks and judicial scholars—including an essay by Ruth Bader Ginsburg—Peppers’s volume seeks to provide an inside look at the professional and personal bonds that form between US lower court judges and their clerks. While most individual essays focus on a single judge and their corps of law clerks—including selection process, contributions, and influence—the volume as a whole seeks to provide a macro-level view of the law clerk’s role in the rapidly changing world of lower federal and state courts.
LAW AND ANIMAL RIGHTS
Deckha, Maneesha. Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 335. $34.95 paper.
Drawing on the feminist animal care tradition, feminist theories of embodiment and relationality, postcolonial theory, and critical animal studies, Deckha examines how Canadian law—and by extension, other legal orders around the world—participates in the social construction of the human-animal divide. Her argument is critical of the liberal legal view of animals and directed at a legal subjectivity for animals attentive to their embodied vulnerability, and advocates for an animal-friendly cultural shift in the core foundations of anthropocentric legal systems.
LAW AND CHILDREN
Gran, Brian. The Sociology of Children’s Rights. Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021. Pp. viii + 259. $64.95 cloth.
Gran examines central questions about what rights accrue to young people, whether those rights advance equality, and how they influence children’s identities, freedoms, and societal participation. He finds that current rights frameworks hinder young people from possessing and benefiting from human rights, arguing that they function as cynical invitations to question whether we truly believe children are endowed with human rights.
LAW AND THE CHINESE STATE
Creemers, Rogier J. E. H., and Trevaskes, Susan, eds. Law and the Party in China: Ideology and Organisation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. viii + 278. $110.00 cloth.
Contributors to Creemers and Trevaskes’s volume argue that China’s legal system needs to be studied from an internal perspective, in order to take into account the characteristic architecture of China’s Party-state. To do so, they address two key elements: ideology and organization, exploring how the Chinese Communist Party conceives of the nature of law and its position within its broader range of policy tools, and how these ideological principles manifest themselves in the application of law.
LAW AND DYING
Buchbinder, Mara. Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. ii + 234. $26.95 cloth.
Over the past five years, legalization of medical aid-in-dying (also known as assisted suicide) has expanded rapidly in the US and is now available to one in five Americans, but studies of implementation have indicated that reality often falls short of the vision of advocates. Buchbinder chronicles two years of ethnographic research on the implementation of Vermont’s 2013 Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act, weaving together stories of patients, caregivers, health care providers, activists, and legislators to illustrate how they navigate aid-in-dying as a new medical frontier in the aftermath of legalization.
LAW AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Rowell, Arden, and Bilz, Kenworthey. The Psychology of Environmental Law. New York: NYU Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 337. $38.00 paper.
Rowell and Bilz argue that when environmental law fails to incorporate insights from psychology, it risks misunderstanding and mispredicting human behaviors that may injure or otherwise affect the environment, and misprescribing legal tools to shape or mitigate those behaviors. In an examination of pollution control, ecosystem management, and climate change law and policy, they locate theoretical and practical payoffs when psychological insights are taken into account.
LAW AND EQUALITY
Besbris, Max. Upsold: Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. ii + 221. $30.00 paper.
Drawing on ethnographic and quantitative housing data, Besbris examines the role that the interactions with sales agents play in US home buyers’ decision making and how neighborhoods are differentiated, valorized, and deemed to be worthy of a certain price. He finds that interactions between real estate agents and buyers make or break neighborhood reputations and construct neighborhoods by price, thus reflecting and exacerbating wealth inequality and the uneven distribution of resources across neighborhoods and to racial and ethnic segregation.
Ballakrishnen, Swethaa S. Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India’s Professional Elite. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. xviii + 266. $95.00 cloth.
In India, less than 10 percent of the country’s lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Drawing from observations and interviews with more than 130 elite professionals, Ballakrishnen examines how a range of underlying mechanisms—gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories—afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, they find that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organizations, but from structural factors that incidentally come together to do gender differently.
Deo, Meera E. Unequal Profession: Race and Gender in Legal Academia. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 235. $25.00 paper.
Comparing the professional and personal experiences of US women law faculty of color with those of white women, white men, and male faculty of color, Deo examines how the race and gender of academics affects their individual and collective experience and legal education as a whole. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data and the stories of individual faculty members, she finds that race and gender intersect to create profound implications for women of color, presenting unique challenges as well as opportunities to improve educational and professional outcomes in legal education.
LAW AND FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
Bowman, Cynthia Grant. Living Apart Together: Legal Protections for a New Form of Family. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 224. $40.00 cloth.
Bowman examines the legal aspects of “doing family” by “living apart together” (LAT), where committed couples maintain separate residences and finances. The term LAT stems from Europe, where this manner of coupledom has been extensively studied. Drawing on literature from outside the US as well as her own US study, she examines the prevalence of LAT, the demographics of participants—focusing on women, gay men, and elderly people—their reasons for doing LAT, and how they manage finances, care during illness, and navigate this arena which is virtually unregulated by law.
He, Xin. Divorce in China: Institutional Constraints and Gendered Outcomes. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2021. Pp. ii + 297. $65.00 cloth.
Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted inside Chinese courtrooms over the course of a decade, Xin He argues that despite the increase of gender consciousness in Chinese society and a trove of legislation to protect women, Chinese women are still disadvantaged in divorce courts. He finds that bureaucratic incentives of courts and their political concerns for social stability drive this result: judges often choose the most efficient, and safest, route, allowing inequality in social, economic, cultural, and political areas to infiltrate their decisions. As a result, divorce requests are delayed; domestic violence is trivialized; and women’s child custody is sacrificed.
LAW AND MEDICINE
Roth, Louise Marie. The Business of Birth: Malpractice and Maternity Care in the United States. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2021. Pp. viii + 323. $35.00 paper.
Roth argues that US laws create an environment where medical providers, malpractice attorneys, and others limit women’s rights and choices during birth. She finds that a fear of liability often drives the decision-making process of medical providers, who prioritize hospital efficiency over patient safety, to the detriment of mothers themselves, and she advocates for an approach that protects the reproductive rights of mothers.
LAW AND NATIONAL SECURITY
Burnep, Gregory. Courts at War: Executive Power, Judicial Intervention, and Enemy Combatant Policies since 9/11. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. xi + 243. $37.50 cloth.
Burnep explores how, after 9/11, US lawyers and judges became deeply involved in an armed conflict, with important consequences for presidential authority, the separation of powers, and the treatment of individuals suspected of posing a threat to the US. He applies an interbranch perspective to argue that litigation and judicial involvement have important implications for changing patterns of policy development in a wide range of national security policy areas, including surveillance, interrogation, targeted killings, and President Trump’s travel ban.
LAW AND RELIGION
Karayanni, Michael. A Multicultural Entrapment: Religion and State Among the Palestinian-Arabs in Israel. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 322. $110.00 cloth.
This book draws attention to the religion and state debate in Israel, which has tended to overlook the Palestinian-Arab religious communities while focusing on Jewish religious institutions and norms. Because religion and state debates in many other countries are defined largely by minority religions’ issues, the debate in Israel is anomalous. Karayanni advances a legal matrix that explains this anomaly by referencing specific constitutional values and argues that what might be seen as liberal and multicultural is at its core just as illiberal and coercive.
LAW AND WOMEN
Schultz, Ulrike, Shaw, Gisela, Thornton, Margaret, and Auchmuty, Rosemary, eds. Gender and Careers in the Legal Academy. Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing, 2021. Pp. xviii + 569. $160.00 cloth.
Schultz, Shaw, Thornton, and Auchmuty’s collection seeks to add to the literature on women in legal practice and the judiciary by focusing on women in the legal academy in various countries throughout the world. Contributors present accounts of the careers of academic pioneers, explore theoretical issues relating to gender and culture, and ask whether the presence of women makes a difference.
LEGAL RULES IN PRACTICE
Dupret, Baudouin, Colemans, Julie, and Travers, Max, eds. Legal Rules in Practice: In the Midst of Law’s Life. New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. Pp. x + 289. $160.00 cloth.
Contributors to Dupret, Colemans, and Travers’s volume ask how legal practitioners and lay participants conceive of and participate in the construction of facts and rules, and thus—through decisions, defenses, pleas, files, evidence, interviews, and documents—actively participate in law’s life. With attention to the formulation of notions such as person, evidence, intention, cause, and responsibility in the course of legal practices, the contributors seek to provide the outlines of a praxiological anthropology of law that focuses on words, concepts, and reasoning as actively used to solve conflicts with the help of legal rules.
LEGAL PROFESSION
Regan, Mitt, and Rohrer, Lisa H.. BigLaw: Money and Meaning in the Modern Law Firm. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 281. $32.50 paper.
Drawing on interviews with more than 250 partners in large firms, Regan and Rohrer find that hiring, promotion, compensation, and termination policies in large US law firms are more influenced by business considerations than ever before and that firms actively recruit profitable partners from other firms to replace those they regard as unproductive. But at the same time, partners continue to seek the non-financial rewards of being members of a distinct profession and are sensitive to whether their firms are committed to providing them.
Vauchez, Antoine, and France, Pierre. The Neoliberal Republic: Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. xii + 190. $21.95 paper.
Vauchez and France examine the effects of the revolving door between public service and private enrichment on the French state and its ability to govern and regulate the private sector. Based on interviews with dozens of public officials in France and a biographical database of more than 200 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers, they find that the always-blurred boundary between public service and private interests has been critically compromised, enabling the transformation of the regulatory state into either an ineffectual bystander or an active collaborator in the privatization of public welfare.
Winston, Clifford, Burk, David, and Yan, Jia. Trouble at the Bar: An Economics Perspective on the Legal Profession and the Case for Fundamental Reform. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2021. Pp. vii + 243. $31.99 paper.
In an economic analysis, Winston, Burk, and Yan argue that the legal profession’s self-regulation has created barriers to entry that reduce the public’s access to justice, limit entry competition, and create a closed environment that inhibits analysis of legal problems. Deregulating the legal profession, they conclude, would allow more people to provide a variety of legal services at lower cost without jeopardizing their quality; spur competition and innovation in the private sector; and increase the quality of lawyers who pursue careers in the public sector.
METHODS OF SOCIOLEGAL RESEARCH
Banner, James M., Jr. The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 284. $28.00 cloth.
Banner argues that historical knowledge is likely to be ever-changing, that history as a branch of knowledge is always a search for meaning and a constant source of argument, and that history is essential to individuals’ awareness of their location in the world and to every group and nation’s sense of identity and destiny. He concludes that all historians are revisionists; as they seek to more fully understand the past, they always bring their distinct minds, dispositions, perspectives, and purposes to bear on their subjects.
Kritzer, Herbert M. Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021. Pp. viii + 160. $24.95 paper, $120.00 cloth, $19.96 eBook.
Kritzer presents an advanced introduction to the history, methods, and substance of empirical legal research. He argues for a mixed methods approach: while quantitative methods dominate in empirical legal research, an important segment of the field draws on qualitative methods such as semi-structured interviews and observation. In the context of a broad overview of empirical research on the institutions of the law, the central actors of the law, and the subjects of the law, he focuses on the importance of methodological choices.
