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Stories from the Field: Collecting Data Outside Over There
Abstract
In recent years there has been increased attention to the value of qualitative research and the methods for conducting that research in a rigorous manor. We now have available excellent discussions of issues of design (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994; Yin 1994), data collection (Douglas 1985; McCracken 1988; Spradley 1979; Spradley 1980), and analysis (Feldman 1995; Miles and Huberman 1994; Silverman 1993; Strauss 1987). My interest in this chapter is on data collection.
... Inspired by a long tradition of ethnographic courtroom work (e.g., Clair, 2020;Conley & O'Barr, 1990;Walenta, 2020) we investigated why cases ended up in the magistrates' courts, and how people made sense of the courts as a space, a process, and an actor in the broader "life of the dispute" (Griffiths, 1998;Weeks, 2013). As such, we triangulated observations, interviews, and textual analysis of court documents to build an in-depth understanding of the role and appeal of the law and courts in a context where people are stereotypically cast as "law avoiders" (Kritzer, 2002). ...
Lower state courts are the focus of both international and national access to justice policies and programs but remain understudied in Uganda. Drawing on 3 years of ethnographically informed research on citizen engagement with a busy magistrates' court in post‐war northern Uganda, we show the diverse reasons why citizens appeal to the rule‐of‐law in places where state authority is contested. In a context of limited statehood, against a backdrop of high‐levels of corruption and inefficiency in the judicial system, people turn to lower state courts for normative, pragmatic, and tactical reasons that are not well captured by conventional measures of procedural justice. Our findings extend theory on citizen‐authority relations in a global context, shedding light on contextual meanings of legitimacy, trust, and corruption in places where lower state courts are deeply problematic sites for achieving justice.
This is the first of two volumes announcing the emergence of the new legal realism as a field of study. At a time when the legal academy is turning to social science for new approaches, these volumes chart a new course for interdisciplinary research by synthesizing law on the ground, empirical research, and theory. Volume 1 lays the groundwork for this novel and comprehensive approach with an innovative mix of theoretical, historical, pedagogical, and empirical perspectives. Their empirical work covers such wide-ranging topics as the financial crisis, intellectual property battles, the legal disenfranchisement of African-American landowners, and gender and racial prejudice on law school faculties. The methodological blueprint offered here will be essential for anyone interested in the future of law-and-society.
Procedure is not just a programme or a nexus of formalities. It is something done by legal experts and lay participants in a highly concerted ensemble. Procedure frames and advances all law-relevant activities. This book, written by three authors from different disciplinary backgrounds, provides an in-depth comparison of criminal defence work in different legal cultures. Via an ethnographic comparison, this book also shows how defence work responds to the challenges of different procedural regimes and how it contributes to their individual outcomes. Criminal Defence and Procedure opens up new horizons for legal comparison, inviting novel understandings of procedural law as well as possibilities of legal reform. © Thomas Scheffer, Kati Hannken-Illjes, Alexander Kozin 2010. All rights reserved.
The exponential growth of China’s megacities has attracted an increasing number of internal
migrants since the mid-1980s. This creates problems regarding access to quality education for the children of these rural-urban migrant households in the cities, since access to education is determined by one’s household registration (hukou). This book presents the results of a socio-legal research on the right to education of children of rural-urban migrant workers in Chongqing. It unravels the intricacies at play in accessing and enjoying compulsory education and assesses the relevance of invoking human rights language in that context.
In this article a micro-sociological research group originally assembled to study criminal defense casework investigates the issue of ethnographic access. The three authors represent three different countries (Germany, the USA, and the UK) with their respective legal contexts. They approach these contexts with Clifford Geertz. Specifically, the authors utilize Geertz’s notion of polarization as an ethnographic resource and a unit of comparison. The authors examine polarization in the narrative mode, comparing different experiences of accessing law firms. The narratives address relevant conceptual and pragmatic issues. For the main findings the authors suggest that accessing ethnographic fields indeed depend on the setting, personality, and the sought-out data; however, one additional factor seems to be universally applicable for all the contexts: access to law is an on-going phenomenon which is predicated on the insider/outsider separation. The notion of hospitality allows the researcher to mitigate that separation (polarization) in the ways intrinsic to the investigated context.
Through interviews with many of the most noteworthy authors in law and society, Conducting Law and Society Research takes students and scholars behind the scenes of empirical scholarship, showing the messy reality of research methods. The challenges and the uncertainties, so often missing from research methods textbooks, are revealed in candid detail. These accessible and revealing conversations about the lived reality of classic projects will be a source of encouragement and inspiration to those embarking on empirical research, ranging across the full array of disciplines that contribute to law and society. For all of the ambiguities and challenges to the social ‘scientific’ study of law, the reflections found in this book - collectively capturing a portrait of the field through the window of the research efforts - individually remind readers that ‘good research’ displays not an absence of problems, but the care taken in negotiating them.
What role should the realities of the legislative drafting process play in the theories and doctrines of statutory interpretation and administrative law? The ongoing debates frequently turn on empirical assumptions about how Congress drafts and what interpretive rules Congress knows, but there has been almost no testing of whether any of these assumptions reflect legislative reality. We have attempted to fill that void. This is the first of two Articles reporting the results of the most extensive empirical study to date — a survey of 137 congressional counsels drawn from both parties, both chambers of Congress and spanning multiple committees — on topics ranging from drafters’ knowledge and use of the textual and substantive canons of interpretation, to legislative history, the administrative law deference doctrines, the legislative process and the Court-Congress relationship. Our findings have implications for virtually every swath of the interpretive debates. We can report, for instance, that there are some canons that our drafters know and use — Chevron and the presumption against preemption, for example, but that there are other canons that our drafters know, but consciously reject in favor of political or other considerations, including the presumption in favor of consistent usage, the rule against superfluities, and dictionary use; and still other canons, like Mead and noscitur a sociis, that our drafters do not know as legal rules but that seem to be accurate judicial reflections of how Congress drafts. Our interviews also elicited a treasure trove of information about key influences on the drafting process that legal doctrine rarely considers, from the variety of audiences for legislative history, to the way in which the personal reputation of particular agency heads affects delegation decisions, to the fact that drafting conventions depend on the type of statute being drafted and its path through Congress. All of these findings, and many others, allow us to press for a more precise answer to one of the fields’ foundational questions: that is, what should be the purpose of these canons of interpretation? Judges, often using the unhelpful generalization that they are Congress’s “faithful agents,” have legitimized these doctrines using a variety of conflicting justifications, some of which turn on empirical reality, some of which do not, and most of which aim to justify many different types of canons that seem to be doing very different types of work. Do the canons reflect how Congress actually drafts, and so effectuate legislative supremacy? Or do judges use the canons for more dialogical reasons, such as to encourage Congress to draft more precisely — and does Congress listen? Might the canons, despite how "neutral" some appear, instead be understood to effectuate judicial values that are external to the legislative process — such as advancing constitutional norms or imposing coherence on the U.S. Code? Our study illuminates this variety across the normative bases for the canons also reveals that each set of justifications rests on a very different vision of the judicial power and the Court-Congress relationship.
In the following discourse analysis, I crisscross the realms of text and talk to follow the microformation of legal discourse. How, I ask, does a barrister put together the case for a Crown Court hearing? This representational project, I argue, involves as-sorted artefacts (marks, modules, maps, or lists) that are consulted as resources on succeeding stages. The various sites of the microformation are the brief, the barris-ter's note book, and some confidential and staged speech events. The offered trans-sequential analysis of legal discourse puts into perspective preparation and per-formance, file work and speech production, procedural history, and the field of pres-ence. I explore, above all, the unknown region in between judicial talk and textuality. In this way, in the article, I account for the complexity, contingency, and craft of crim-inal defense. According to the canon of qualitative methods, discourses are either made out of talk or text. Actors, members, or participants either seem to speak or write, listen or read. The legal sphere is understood as being driven by "two types of legal discourse: first the largely written discourse of judges, lawyers, and scholars about law and legal doctrine; and second, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 39(3), 303–342 Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Constitutional ethnography is the study of the central legal elements of polities using methods that are capable of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape. This article provides an introduction to this sort of study by contrasting constitutional ethnography with multivariate analysis and with nationalist constitutional analysis. The article advocates not a universal one-size-fits-all theory or an elegant model that abstracts away the distinctive, but instead outlines an approach that can identify a set of repertoires found in real cases. Learning the set of repertoires that constitutional ethnography reveals, one can see more deeply into particular cases. Constitutional ethnography has as its goal, then, not prediction but comprehension, not explained variation but thematization.
Each year more than 2 million Americans divorced, and most of them use a lawyer. In closed-door conversations between lawyers and their clients strategy is planned, tactics are devised, and the emotional climate of the divorce is established. Do lawyers contribute to the pain and emotional difficulty of divorce by escalating demands and encouraging unreasonable behavior? Do they take advantage of clients at a time of emotional difficulty? Can and should clients trust their lawyers to look out for their welfare and advance their long-term interests? Austin Sarat and William L.F. Felstiner’s new book, based on a pioneering and intensive study of actual conferences between divorce lawyers and their clients, provides an unprecedented behind-the-scenes description of the lawyer-client relationship, and calls into question much of the conventional wisdom about what divorce lawyers actually do. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients suggests that most divorces are marked less by a pattern of aggressive advocacy than by one of inaction and drift. It uncovers reasons why lawyers find divorce practice frustrating and difficult and why clients frequently feel dissatisfied with their lawyers. This new work provides a unique perspective on the dynamics of professionalism. It charts the complex and shifting ways lawyers and clients “negotiate” their relationship as they work out the strategy and tactics of divorce. Sarat and Felstiner show how both lawyers and clients are able to draw on resources of power to set the agenda of their interaction, while neither one is fully in charge. Rather, power shifts between the two parties; where it is achieved, power is found in the ability to have one’s understandings of the social and legal worlds of divorce accepted. Power then works through the creation of shared meanings. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients examines the effort to create such shared meanings about the nature of marriage and why marriages fail, the operation of the legal process, and the best way to bring divorces to closure. It will be fascinating reading for anyone who is going through, or has gone through a divorce, as well as for lawyers, judges, and scholars of law and society.
In the world of no-fault divorce, the legal process formally has limied functions—dividing assets and future income, fixing custody and visitation, and, occasionally, protecting physical safety and property (Jacob, 1988: 5, 7–8; Weitzman, 1985: chap. 2). Nonetheless, if they are to provide effective representation on each of these issues, lawyers must understand their client’s goals, expectations, and objectives (McEwen et al., 1994: 169). But interpreting clients’ interests is a known quagmire (Kressel et al., 1978). Clients often do not appear to know what they want, or may not want what they “ought” to want. They seem to change their minds in unpredictable ways, or they may not change their minds when it is, from their lawyer’s point of view, strategically wise to do so. Moreover, they may find it difficult to distinguish betwee lawyers who are trying to impose their own vision and those who are trying to develop a shared set of goals, expectations, and objectives (Simon, 1984).
This paper reports on an attempt by an interdisciplinary team to observe and record on tape lawyer-client interaction in the metropolitan Boston area in 1975-77. Current pressure for greater accountability to the public on the part of the legal profession makes the empirical, observational study of lawyer-client relations a timely, important topic. Despite the investment of much time and energy in creating conditions suitable for such a study, the project team failed to gain access to private lawyer-client encounters. The goal of the paper is to try to account for this failure, to analyze the nature of the obstacles encountered, and to stimulate speculation on how these obstacles might be overcome in the future. It is suggested that the doctrine of attorney-client privilege is the major obstacle which researchers must overcome. The idea of paying attorneys for their cooperation is also considered.
This article reports on divorce lawyers' descriptions of their interactions with clients, focusing on three types of decisions
common to divorce cases: whether to accept a potential client, whether and how much attention to pay to the client's emotional
needs, and how to persuade a client to accept an appropriate case outcome. The lawyers' reports reveal interesting variation
in how they approach such decisions. However, most of the lawyers make clear that they do not regard the lawyer-client relationship
as one between equals, and they describe a variety of tactics that they employ to maintain control over the client and the
case.
The teaching of qualitative analysis in the social sciences is rarely undertaken in a structured way. This handbook is designed to remedy that and to present students and researchers with a systematic method for interpreting qualitative data', whether derived from interviews, field notes, or documentary materials. The special emphasis of the book is on how to develop theory through qualitative analysis. The reader is provided with the tools for doing qualitative analysis, such as codes, memos, memo sequences, theoretical sampling and comparative analysis, and diagrams, all of which are abundantly illustrated by actual examples drawn from the author's own varied qualitative research and research consultations, as well as from his research seminars. Many of the procedural discussions are concluded with rules of thumb that can usefully guide the researchers' analytic operations. The difficulties that beginners encounter when doing qualitative analysis and the kinds of persistent questions they raise are also discussed, as is the problem of how to integrate analyses. In addition, there is a chapter on the teaching of qualitative analysis and the giving of useful advice during research consultations, and there is a discussion of the preparation of material for publication. The book has been written not only for sociologists but for all researchers in the social sciences and in such fields as education, public health, nursing, and administration who employ qualitative methods in their work.
This book is "a questioning of the foundations of research in order to shed new light on the many very real and very important problems of sociological measurements. The author raises theoretical and methodological questions about objective and subjective procedures and examines many of the presuppositions of current modes of research." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Interviews are ubiquitous in modern society, and they play a crucial role in social scientific research. But, as Charles Briggs convincingly argues in this book, received interviewing techniques rest on fundamental misapprehensions about the nature both of the interview as a communicative event, and of the nature of the data that it produces. Furthermore, interviewers rarely examine the compatibility of interviews as a means of acquiring information to one another. These oversights often blind interviewers to ensuing errors of interpretation, as well as to the limitations of the interview as a means of acquiring data. To conflict these problems, Professor Briggs presents an analysis of the 'communicative blunders' that he himself committed in conducting research interviews among Spanish-speakers in northern New Mexico. By focusing on these errors and exploring how they may be avoided, he is able to propose new techniques for designing, implementing, and analyzing interview-based research. These rest on identifying the subjects' resources for conveying information, and the relative compatability of the shared rules and understandings that underlie their strategies with those associated with interviews. Critical of existing paradigms of interviewing, which he sees as deriving from Western 'folk' theories of reality and communication, Briggs shows that the development of more sophisticated interviewing methodologies requires further research into interviewing itself. Briggs's conclusions provide a basis for the reexamination of current uses of interviews in a wide range of contexts - from social science research to job applications, welfare and health care delivery, criminal and legal investigations, journalism and broadcasting, and other areas of everyday life. His book will appeal to linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, as well as other readers whose research or professional activities depend on the use of interviews.
The survival of a plaintiffs’ lawyer’s practice depends upon the generation of an ongoing flow of clients with injuries that the civil justice system will compensate adequately. If this requirement is not met, lawyers will leave this aspect of the legal market for more promising ones. If they do, legal services for injured people will be diminished as a result. In order to find out how this personal services legal market is defined and developed, we interviewed ninety-five plaintiffs’ lawyers in Texas. These lawyers use four major strategies to get clients: client referrals, lawyer referrals, direct marketing, and other referrals. What any particular lawyer does is shaped by the geographic market from which clients are drawn, and by the lawyer’s reputation. Our findings provide fresh insights for the empirical literature on plaintiffs’ lawyers, and they provide an empirical context for assessing the potential impact of changes in the civil justice system, like tort reform, on the ability of plaintiffs’ lawyers to obtain clients.
Where do the clients of contingency fee lawyers come from, and what are the implications of client sources for contingency fee practice? Those are the questions this paper considers, drawing upon multiple sources of data. The analysis shows that relatively few clients come to lawyers’ offices in response to advertising. Rather, it is the more traditional route of reputationally based referrals that bring in the vast majority of contingency fee clients. The importance of maintaining a reputation that will draw in future clients tends to curb the potential for abuses created by the inherent conflict of interest between lawyer and client that the contingency fee creates.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Northwestern University, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 439-453). Microfiche.
Con base en los datos recopilados para una investigación muy grande sobre la vivienda estudiantil en una universidad, la autora de este libro explica diversas maneras de interpretar la información a través de diversos métodos de acercamiento: etnometodología, análisis semiótico y teatral, deconstrucción.
Libro de metodología cualitativo para investigación en las ciencias sociales. La utilización de la computadora, el uso de datos y la recolección de los mismos. Se describen detalladamente numerosos métodos de datos y análisis.
Interviewing Trial Judges
- Heumann
Marc 1953 The Historian’s Craft. Translated by Peter Putnam
- Bloch
‘That’s 95% of the Game, Just Getting the Case’: Markets, Norms, and How Texas Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Get Clients
- Stephen Daniels
- Joanne Martin
Neuwirth 1962 Who Sues in New York City? A Study of Automobile Accident Claims
- Roger Hunting
- Gloria S Bryand
Getting Clients: Supply and Demand Among Plaintiff’s Personal Injury Attorneys in Indiana.” Paper presented at meeting of Law & Society Association
- Van Hoy
Grant 1988 The Long Interview
- Mccracken
Conversations At Random: Survey Research As Interviewers See It
- Jean M Converse
- Howard Schuman
- JM Converse
Creative Interviewing
- Jack D Douglas
- JD Douglas