Fieldwork on Law

Based on a review of field-based scholarship on law published in English in 2004 and 2005, this review focuses on themes most strongly emergent across the disciplines of law and the social sciences: state regulation of the private sector, rights (individual rights, indigenous rights, and human rights), and security. These developing areas of field research show the impact of neoliberalism on the social fields of law, an impact intensified by the war on terror. They also point to fresh theoretical horizons in relation to issues of identity, hegemony, and the discursivity of state power. Although disciplines retain their distinctive questions and approaches, they reveal common attention to discourse and practice—particularly in relation to critical events in the war on terror and new forms of executive power, especially in the United States. Current literature thus points not only to new terrain for field research on law, but also, correspondingly, to the changing nature of the field itself as a methodological object.