Conducting Law and Society Research Reflections on Methods and Practices [Paperback]

This book provides students and scholars with a candid look at how empirical research projects actually happen.This book provides students and scholars with a candid look at how empirical research projects actually happen. Focusing on the interdisciplinary Law and Society field, more than twenty interviews with authors of classic projects  from sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, law, and history  the chapters are unique in their honesty. They help readers to understand the choices, challenges, and uncertainty that go into even some of the best research projects.This book provides students and scholars with a candid look at how empirical research projects actually happen. Focusing on the interdisciplinary Law and Society field, more than twenty interviews with authors of classic projects  from sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, law, and history  the chapters are unique in their honesty. They help readers to understand the choices, challenges, and uncertainty that go into even some of the best research projects.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 talCv