Law and Everyday Life
Patricia Ewick, Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
Historically, law and everyday life have been defined in opposition to one another. Over the past century, the boundary
separating law from everyday life has become blurred. Increasingly, socio-legal scholars understand law and everyday life to
be mutually constituted in a dynamic and emergent process wherein law is produced and applied in the everyday domain of
social action. At the same time, the practices, relationships, and meanings that make up the everyday are themselves, in part,
constructed by law or legality.
Law and Everyday Life
Law and everyday life have been defined historically in oppo-
sition to one another. Everyday life has typically denoted that
sphere of social action characterized by being familiar, routine,
pragmatic, and particular: the world of work, play, family, and
leisure. By contrast, law has been conceptualized as formal,
timeless, general, and transcendent. In the context of this
opposition, law was understood to radiate downward toward
everyday life to resolve conflicts and impart order. Everyday
relationships, interactions, and practices were thought to
constitute the objects upon which law operated with varying
degrees of success. Alexis De Tocqueville articulated such a view
of law and the everyday life over 200 years ago:
The language of the law thus becomes, in some measure, a vulgar
tongue; the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools and
courts of justice, gradually penetrates their walls into the bosom of
society, where it descends to the lowest classes, so that at last the
whole people contract the habit and tastes of the judicial magistrate.
(Tocqueville, 1959: pp. 2–20)
Over the past century, the boundary separating law from
everyday life has become increasingly blurred. With the blur-
ring of this boundary, the presumed direction of effect from
law (‘the schools and courts of justice’) downward to ‘society’
has likewise been challenged. Increasingly, socio-legal scholars
understand law and everyday life to be mutually constituted in
a dynamic and emergent process wherein law is produced and
applied in the everyday domain of social action. At the same
time, the practices, relationships, and meanings that make up
the everyday life are themselves, at least in part, constructed by
law or legality.
Legal Realism: The Everyday Life of the Law
In the early twentieth century, a perspective called legal
realism rejected the prevailing formalist perspective on law
(see Legal Realism; Legal Formalism). Whereas legal
formalism saw the law as having an internal logic that led to
determinant outcomes, legal realism posited that law is more
than the rules and pronouncements contained in judicial
decisions or statutes. Legal realists understood that legal rules
468 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 13
were not simply and mechanically applied by judges, lawyers,
police, and regulators. They proposed to account for the gap
between ‘law on the books’ and ‘law in action,’ that is,
between the law as envisioned by its makers and law as it is
actually enforced on a daily basis.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1897), a distinguished jurist and
philosopher of law, postulated that the life of the law is
experience, not logic. The realist view of law as action and
experience assumes that law has a life outside of legal texts
and that the contours of law’s life are shaped by the interests,
and limited by the vision, of its agents. By studying the
impediments to full enforcement of law, legal realists
implicitly rejected de Tocqueville’s assertion that the ‘habits
and tastes’ of the magistrate inevitably penetrate into the
bosom of society. In radiating outward, the law encounters
myriad obstacles to its full and intended enforcement. The
obstacles might include the bounded rationality, political, or
economic interests, or even the biographical idiosyncrasies of
legal agents. In short, in entering the realm of lived
experience, legal rules are articulated within particular social
and historical contexts that shape law’s effects. This
proposition authorized an examination of those contexts and
constraints, thus creating an opening to the everyday in the
study of law.
Law First Perspective
Legal realism – even while it acknowledged the life, and not
merely the spirit of the law – assiduously maintained the
boundary between the law and everyday life, retaining what has
been called a ‘law first’ orientation (Sarat and Kearns, 1993).
Even Holmes – after declaring the logic of law to be a myth –
closes his essay ‘The Path of the Law’ (1897) with an
invocation of law’s universality and distance from everyday
life: “The remoter and more general aspects of the law are
those which give it universal interest. It is through them that
you.connect your subject with the universe, and catch an
echo of the whole, a glimpse of the unfathomable process,
a hint of the universal law” (pp. 405, 406). The law may
make its way in the world, but it still inhabits the lofty
reaches of the universe. Moreover, the view that the law is
distinct from the everyday underwrote the legal realists’
conviction that the law could be used instrumentally to bring
about progressive social reform.
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Karl Llewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebel in their classic book
The Cheyenne Way (1941) proposed that law performed a dual
function in ordering everyday life. Frequently, the law’s
prescriptions operated beneath the level of notice or
consciousness “to make [people] go round in more or less
clear ways.” In this regulative function, the law created
routines and norms that structured people’s practices and
expectations. At times, however, the so-called drift of
everyday life produced divergent interests, expectations, and
norms that upset the orderliness of social life. Llewellyn
and Hoebel referred to these instances as ‘trouble cases’ and
proposed that a central function of the law is to process these
cases to restore social order. ‘Law,’ they wrote, “exists for the
event of breach of law and has a major portion of its essence in
the doing of something about such a breach” (Llewellyn and
Hoebel 1941: p. 20). How law responds to such breaches –
how it selects cases of trouble, in what way it redresses these
situations and with what consequences – ultimately comes to
comprise the law. Accordingly, Llewellyn and Hoebel recom-
mended empirical examination of the selection, processing,
and resolution of ‘trouble cases’ as a way of elucidating and
understanding the law. Research in this tradition focused on
the everyday work of legal professionals, examining such
processes as judicial decision making, prosecutorial discretion,
or police arrest practice within specific organizational and
political contexts.
When the everyday world is examined within this tradition,
it is only at the boundary that separates law from society, in
those settings where citizens brought their disputes, claims, and
grievances to the attention of legal professionals. Social scien-
tific research examined, for instance, the sorts of claims and
awards made in small claims courts (Yngvesson and
Hennessey, 1975), the advice given in lawyer’s offices (Sarat
and Felstiner, 1995), or police arrest discretion (Black, 1971).
In short, the everyday was included in these analyses of law,
only in those instances when its familiar routines broke
down to the point where the law was mobilized to restore
order, redress an injury, or protect a right.
In The Common Place of Law (1998), Ewick and Silbey point
out the problem with the ‘law first’ approach.
The most serious limitation of this institutionally centered law-first
perspective is that, by reckoning the boundary of law to corre-
spond neatly to its formal institutional boundary, we drastically
narrow our vision. By focusing our scholarly gaze on exchanges
across that boundary, we fail to ask how people go to that hypoth-
esized boundary. We exclude from observation that which needs yet
to be explained: how, where, and with what effect law is produced in
and through common place social interactions within neighbor-
hoods, workplaces, families, schools, community organizations and
the like. (1998: p. 20)
Everyday Life versus the Law
This ‘law first’ perspective shifted somewhat as scholars began
to consider normative systems that function as an alternative or
precursor to law – such as custom or religion. Whereas legal
realists depicted the law as intervening in social life to create
Law and Everyday Life 469
and restore order, Paul Bohannon (1973) presented law as
emerging out of customary practices. He claimed that law
resulted from a double institutionalization of such practices.
This process of formalization granted to custom a force and
legitimacy that eventually led to law having a life and
dynamic of its own. Hence, according to Bohannon, while
law attains an existence apart from the everyday, its source
lies within the social. Its relative independence did more than
simply reflect custom; as a result of the restatement of the
customary in the process of formalization, the law is ‘always
out of phase with society’ (Bohannon 1973: p. 311).
Bohannon did not see the gap between the legal and the
social as a problem, but rather as a fertile source of change
and growth: “It is the fertile dilemma of law that it must
always be out of step with society; but that people always.
attempt to reduce the lack of phase. Custom must either
grow to fit the law or it must actively reject it; law must grow
to fit the custom, or it must suppress it” (1973: p. 311). Thus
law and everyday are located in different ‘realms,’ yet they are
inextricably linked to one another.
The ‘law first’ perspective was also displaced in research that
examined citizens’ decisions to turn to the law. Studying the
daily enforcement practices of legal agents revealed the extent
to which most western legal systems are reactive, that is, rely on
citizens to mobilize the law. Obviously, this is true in the case
of civil law where citizens seek legal remedies for private
disputes. It is also true in regard to criminal law, however. In
a classic study of police arrest decisions, for instance, Donald
Black (1971) found that approximately 87% of all police–
citizen encounters were initiated by citizens either in the role
of victims or witnesses. In mobilizing both civil and criminal
law, citizens are thus responsible for shaping the number and
type of cases that the law processes. Recognition of their crucial
role in determining legal caseloads, shifted research toward the
question of how citizens interpret situations and make the
decision to turn to law.
In this tradition, Felstiner et al. (1980–1981) developed
a model of the interpretive process that leads up to a citizen’s
decision to seek legal remedies. To begin with, problems and
situations (potential ‘trouble cases’) are not self-evidently
injurious or legal. Therefore, Felstiner et al. refer to the first
stage in this process as ‘naming,’ or defining a situation or
event as injurious. ‘Blaming’ refers to the identification of
a party who is responsible for the problem. Finally, ‘claim-
ing’ entails bringing the grievance or complaint to a third
party (which may or may not be a legal body) to obtain
remedy. Although the model postulates an individual deci-
sion maker, it stimulated interest in the cultural meanings
and values that might compete with interpretations favoring
legal action at any point in the process. It also suggested that
the relationship between law and everyday life was uneven
and variable. Certain kinds of issues – for instance, envi-
ronmental harm – are resistant to being transformed into
legal disputes; while others – automobile accidents – yield
a much greater number of legal claims. In considering these
matters, socio-legal research extended its analyses to the
communities and cultures that exist beyond the legal arena
and led to a greater appreciation of how everyday life
becomes illegible or uninterpretable within the grid of law
and legal categories.
470 Law and Everyday Life
Researchers in the law versus everyday life tradition were
also particularly interested in those instances where the law
interacted with alternative normative systems. Legal anthro-
pologist Sally Falk Moore (1972) examined the relationship
between law and custom in the context of delimited
structured everyday interactions, or what she referred to as
social fields. She defined social fields as patterns of
relationship and interaction that are ongoing and which
generate rules that coerce or induce compliance. While such
fields are defined by their capacity to generate norms and
customs, their boundaries are porous and thus they are
susceptible to external norms, including the law. Because of
this openness, Moore characterized social fields as
‘semiautonomous.’ Actors within these fields are constrained
by legal norms but not determined by them. Like Bohannon,
Moore further blurred the boundary between the two spheres
by highlighting how they might mutually reinforce or
undermine one another. Drawing from an analysis of the
garment industry, Moore noted that union bosses routinely
refrained from enforcing the law when the workload was
heavy and overtime was needed. In exchange, the garment
contractors would give gifts such as liquor and dresses.
Something that looked like friendships emerged over time
and became essential for the smooth functioning of the
industry. Moore points out, however, that these informal
exchange norms did not supersede the law. Even in relaxing
labor laws that stipulated hours of work, the law was
operating, although not as its framers intended. Even if the
labor boss did not enforce the law, everyone understood that
he could. The law empowered him; and the possibility of his
exercising legal rules explained the pattern of gifts and fictive
friendships. Moore thus summed up the ongoing
interpenetration of law and custom: “A court or legislature
can make custom law. A semi-autonomous field can make
law its custom” (Moore, 1972: p. 79).
A similar relationship was described by Stewart Macaulay in
a classic article entitled ‘Non-contractual Relations in Business:
A Preliminary Study’ (1963). Macaulay found that law suits for
breach of contract are relatively rare among businessmen. The
paramount reason for this included the availability of
effective nonlegal sanctions that operated within the business
community, such as gossip, giving or withholding of advice,
or expertise. But more importantly, the businessmen’s
reluctance to use the law in lieu of these alternatives was due
to the mutual desirability of maintaining ongoing
relationships and the sense that invoking formal law would
interfere with that goal. Robert Ellickson found that
neighboring cattle ranchers in California rarely invoked the
law in disputes involving trespass. Like Macaulay’s
businessmen and Moore’s garment contractors, the ranchers,
according to Ellickson, do not want, or necessarily need, the
law to achieve order.
Others examined the cultural and symbolic implications of
resorting to law in the context of alternative normative realms.
In her ethnography of a small Baptist community in Georgia,
Carol Greenhouse found that the religious commitments of the
members of this community tended to suppress disputes and
steer members away from secular legal processes in the event
that disputes did occur (1986). Their outright rejection of law,
she wrote, “.is rooted in the logic of sacredness that obviates
not only applications of human authority, but human
authority itself” (p. 206). Robert Kidder (1990) studied other
‘law-avoiding’ societies – including the Amish and the
Japanese – and similarly discovered, in each case, an incom-
patibility between the community’s ideological or spiritual
commitments and law.
The research on law avoidance thus served to correct the
sense that law was paramount in ordering relationships in
modern societies. By proposing that law is only one of vari-
ously competing normative orders available to citizens for
achieving orderly relationships, this research further under-
scored the need for a serious consideration of everyday lives,
relationships, and beliefs of citizens.
Although this research abandoned an exclusive or primary
focus on formal law – considering informal community norms
and practices as well – it continued to conceive of law and
everyday life as distinct and relatively autonomous from one
another. Indeed, by focusing on law avoidance, the relation-
ship between the formal law and the informal norms of
everyday life was depicted as not merely distinct but opposi-
tional. Subsequent research and theory has challenged the idea
that law and everyday life are autonomous or oppositional,
suggesting instead that the two exist in a dynamic and mutually
constitutive relationship.
Law in Everyday Life; Everyday Life in Law
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, socio-legal
scholars began to examine everyday life not simply as an
object of legal action or as a reservoir of potential legal cases
but as a domain in which law circulates, is appropriated,
invoked, resisted, and produced. This view of the law rejects the
notion of law as a mere instrument to be used or avoided by
citizens for achieving social or private ends. Law and the
everyday are seen as mutually constitutive, that is, literally
‘making up’ each other in an ongoing dynamic process.
Barbara Yngvesson (1989) has argued that law is invented
by citizens in local struggles over the meaning of fundamental
cultural symbols such as ‘community,’ ‘neighborhood,’ or
‘rights.’ As citizens act on their understanding, law “emerges
in the exchanges and the struggles of everyday people, in
neighborhood fights and lovers’ quarrels, in the framing
of claims and complaints to the police, the court,
neighborhood justice, and other agencies, and in the
response to these agencies to such claims.” (p. 1709)
Citizens do not, in other words, simply mobilize the police
or go to court with their preconstituted legal cases. Before the
formal legal apparatus has been invoked, the cases have been
fashioned out of the popular legal culture circulating in
everyday life. The results of that fashioning come to constitute
what cases are processed, decided, and contested in formal
legal settings. Rather than imagining law as existing apart
from social relations, or conceiving of it as produced solely by
groups of powerful lawmakers (such as legislatures), in this
constitutive view, law is understood as emerging from the
‘bottom up’ as a continuing product of practical reason and
action.
Of course, the shape and content of everyday life is funda-
mentally dependent upon law as well. Even when we act in

situations that seem devoid of legal meaning or involve a self-
conscious avoidance of law, we do not escape the constitutive
power of law. The law creates roles, relationships, and obliga-
tions. It ‘names the world.’ To routinely enact the roles of wife,
doctor, or consumer, or any social role, tacitly implicates the
law. In fact, the appearance of the routine, the familiar, and the
quotidian is in no small measure a consequence of those
unspoken legal meanings.
This view of law and everyday life would take issue with the
conclusions of research, such as Macaulay’s (1963) and
Ellickson’s (1991). In demonstrating the absence of law in
the ongoing relationship between businessmen or cattle
ranchers, this research fails to note that the very roles and
relationships in which their subjects act are legal creations.
Moreover, the concepts of private property or profit, for
instance, draw upon legally produced and sanctioned
meanings. As Sarat and Kearns (1993) have written, “one is
apt to catch more than a fleeting glimpse of law’s presence in
the putatively alegal responses” (p. 47).
Recognizing the pervasive presence of law outside of formal
institutional settings, Ewick and Silbey (1998) used the concept
of legality to augment the concept of formal law. By legality,
they refer to the meanings, sources of authority, and cultural
practices that are commonly recognized as legal, regardless of
who employs them or for what ends. In this rendering,
people may invoke and enact legality in ways neither
approved nor acknowledged by the law. Legality operates as
both an interpretative framework and a set of resources with
which and through which the social world (including that
part known as the law) is constituted. In sum, they conceive
legality as an emergent structure of social life that manifests
itself in diverse places, including both formal institutional
settings and the everyday lives of groups and communities.
Studying legality wherever it manifests itself has led to the
broadening of subjects and sites of research. One example of
research that has systematically explored the presence of law in
everyday life is Hendrik Hartog’s analysis (Hartog, 1993) of the
eighteenth century diary of Abigail Bailey. Hartog’s reading of
Abigail Bailey’s diary reveals how this woman, over the
course of many years, struggled to make sense of her
marriage, her husband’s sexual abuse of their daughter, and
their separation and eventual divorce, as well as her own
religious beliefs regarding her duties as a wife and mother.
Hartog demonstrates that although law is conspicuously
absent from the diary, this narrative of personal tragedy and
change is incomprehensible without reference to legal
categories such as the prevailing law of coverture (a woman’s
loss of legal rights or personality upon marriage). Abigail
Bailey’s perception and assessment of her situation and her
daughter’s experiences, were conditioned upon her
understanding of the legitimacy of a husband’s desires and
the priority of his rights. Because the law established
a husband as a virtual sovereign within his family, it was
difficult to question or oppose openly her husband’s actions
as inappropriate.
The recognition that law and everyday life are mutually
constitutive has led to an interest in legal consciousness,
ideology, and resistance (see Legal Culture and Legal
Consciousness). In fact, some have argued that the fact that our
glimpse of law in everyday life is ‘fleeting’ gets to the heart of
Law and Everyday Life 471
law’s power and to the power that law confers. John Brigham
observes that “Law is hard to see unless it wants to be seen”
(2009: p. 382). The reasons for this are twofold: First,
professional legal actors benefit from a vision of law as
esoteric and remote from daily life. More importantly, when
law constitutes the contours of life without being implicated
in doing so, it naturalizes the power and privilege it
produces. According to Antonio Gramsci (1971) when law
‘disappears’ itself from daily life, its power becomes
hegemonic. The key to the hegemonic power of law is the
maintenance of what Gramsci called ‘contradictory
consciousness,’ an experience of the world in which an
unbridgeable chasm exists between the experience of
everyday life in which people encounter the conditions of
work and lived social relations and the official accounts of
how things work. Hegemonic power operates not by top–
down social control or the imposition of a single vision of
the world, but by disqualifying the significance of everyday
experience through reification, wherein historically specific
processes and behaviors are ‘misrecognized’ as having
a temporal and spatial transcendence.
The study of the hegemonic power of law has led to an
interest in how the law is embedded in citizens’ conscious-
ness, how they imagine and ‘enact’ law. This would include
not only how and when citizens mobilize formal law, but
also how they may invoke, interpret, avoid, and deploy law
and legal concepts in daily interactions even when no formal
or official actors or rules are involved. Socio-legal scholars
who have studied the legal consciousness of ordinary citizens
have found evidence of such contradictory consciousness in
which the internal connection between legality and partic-
ular experiences is severed in ways that insulate legal insti-
tutions from critique. The reified version of the world
becomes the standard of objective reality against which the
subjective, the concrete, and the immediate (the ‘here and
now-ness’ of everyday life) are assessed and interpreted.
Ewick and Silbey (1998), for instance, found that American
citizens often locate legality in the legal rules and
regulations that seem to produce effects independent of
human action. One man they interviewed, explained why
he failed to lodge a complaint of discrimination after
having been paid less than others. He explained that his
employer used ‘a grading system’ to determine salaries and
there was nothing he could do. His injustice claim was
thus thwarted by an impersonal metric that seemingly
could not be challenged.
Yet, hegemony is never total. It is, rather, a “process of
continuous creation which, given its massive scale, is bound to
be uneven in the degree of legitimacy it commands and to leave
some room for antagonistic cultural expressions to develop”
(Adamson, 1983: p. 174). Indeed, within the contradictions of
consciousness lie the possibilities for challenge and resistance.
For example, David Engel’s study of the Education for All
Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Engel, 1993) rejects
a traditional analysis that would have traced the ways in
which this legislation unilaterally constrained or defined the
educational experiences of children, the meaning of their
physical conditions, or the interactions that occurred between
parents and educators. Instead, he examines how this
legislation and everyday life within this community are
472 Law and Everyday Life
interdependent and mutually shaped this social domain.
At times, Engel notes, the law reinscribed ‘commonsense’
images of disability and difference, constituting the meaning
and content of those social categories as they operated within
the community. Even though the intended effect of the
legislation was to challenge the community’s perception of
these students as different, – by mandating educational
inclusion – the law’s challenge to common prejudices was only
partial. Engel observes, for instance, that in order to receive the
benefits of educational inclusion guaranteed under this legis-
lation, the law required an initial determination by educational
experts that a child was different, in other words disabled or
abnormal, and thus subject to the law’s protection. He also
shows that the operation of the law in marking differences did
not itself go unchallenged. Parents resisted this requirement,
with varying degrees of success, by rejecting the holistic term
‘disabled’ and insisting on more specific and limited descrip-
tions of each child’s condition (such as ‘speech impairment’ or
‘cerebral palsy’). This sort of resistance was possible because the
legislation did not simply reinstate existing authority relations.
The statute, by prescribing parental involvement, made such
challenges possible. The legal rights of handicapped children
were not simply bestowed from above or asserted from below,
but emerged as a product of a complex array of social
relations – part legislation, part community conceptions of
difference, part professional authority, and part parental desires
for their children’s inclusion.
Research such as Engel’s illustrates that law’s presence in
everyday life, while a source of its hegemonic power, also
exposes law to forms of resistance, subversion, and alteration.
While much of this resistance is tactical and opportunistic,
remaining as fleeting and ephemeral as the power it opposes, it
may also take the form of an organized challenge. In their
analysis of the development of the alternative birth movement,
Beckett and Hoffman (2005) argue that the movement was
paradoxically stimulated by the efforts of organized medicine
to mobilize law to prevent the licensure of midwives. Having
entered the discursive field, law – in particular that law that
‘privileged’ organized medicine – became available as
a resource for challengers. “The fact that many legislators
explained their decision to vote in favor of midwifery licensure
in terms of the very categories that are thought to privilege
medicine indicates that hegemony is indeed contestable and
transformable. Cultural meanings, images, and associations are
not fixed, but (somewhat) fluid; this fluidity is an important
resource for movement activists resisting sociolegal hegemony”
(p. 164).
Recognizing the fallibility and vulnerability of law that
circulates in everyday life, Kitty Calavita (2001) claims that law
can have deconstitutive effects, that is, it can undermine its
own ideological categories. Analyzing the public rejection and
ridicule of an Italian Supreme Court decision that overturned
a rape conviction on the grounds that the alleged victim was
wearing blue jeans (which the court assumed could not be
taken off without cooperation by their wearer), she argues that
law exposed its own ‘ideological blunders’ and the outmoded
moral vision it endorses. She concludes that such
deconstitutive events are more likely to occur during ‘unsettled
cultural periods’ during which there are explicit challenges to
entrenched ways of thinking and doing (Swidler, 1986: p. 273).
The fate of law and everyday life in such unsettled periods is
the question examined by David Engel and Jaruwan S. Engel in
Tort, Custom and Karma: Globalization and Legal Consciousness in
Thailand (2010). They begin by asking “What happens to law
in the lives of ordinary people when a society undergoes
rapid change, economic development, and integration into
global markets?”(p. 3). Based on in-depth interviews with
35 people from Chiangmai who had been injured as a result of
the conduct of another person, the authors trace the trans-
formation of legal culture and consciousness in contemporary
Thailand as a result of globalization. They depict a situation in
which both state and customary law are increasingly irrelevant
and, in the case of state law, an illegitimate way of ordering
social relations.
By the 1930s, Thailand had adopted a legal system that
conformed to the model of a liberal legal state. Recognizing
individual subjects, valuing neutrality in judging, and adopting
written laws and opinions, this state law operated evenly across
delimited spatial and temporal boundaries. Thailand also had
a customary legality which was, by contrast, defined around the
idea of sacred centers – located in the heart of family, village,
and community – whose authority diminished as it radiated
outward. This customary legality was animated by ideas of
karma, spirits, fate, and collective harm, and it was based on
these concepts that fault and remedy were defined. Despite
their differences, state and customary legality were mutually
reinforcing. Operating as a court of last resort to enforce deci-
sions made at the local level, state law institutionalized, and
thus reinforced, customary remedies. At the same time, state
law derived its own legitimacy from its connections to
customary legal forms.
This interlegality thus sustained the multiple legal orders. At
the same time, as Engel and Engel’s research demonstrates,
such interlegality also exposed both legal orderings to a shared
vulnerability. The rapid social changes in the late twentieth
century meant that people work and travel far from their
villages and thus from sacred centers and customary authority.
Injuries are no longer interpreted within the discourse of
malevolent spirits posing risks of collective harm and thus
warranting collectively enforced remedies. Instead, injuries are
considered karmic in origin and thus the responsibility of the
injured person. Moreover, within this cosmology, to pursue
legal compensation through state law is thought to be a delu-
sion and a form of attachment that will only lead to further
suffering. Thus the displacements of globalization have led to
the individuation of injuries and a withering of both state and
customary law, and with them the possibility of obtaining
justice through legal means.
Conclusion
Socio-legal research on law and everyday life began by
conceiving of the two spheres as relatively autonomous.
Research in this tradition asserted the primacy of law in
generating norms and stressed its regulative function in pro-
cessing ‘trouble cases’ and restoring order to the everyday
world. By the middle of the twentieth century, however,
scholars began to question the distinctiveness of law and the
everyday. Law not only performs a restorative function when

norms are violated, its categories and discourses constituted the
order that is occasionally disrupted by trouble. People’s iden-
tities and relationships are crafted out of legal ideas; the
material world – including bodies – is a product of law. Thus,
law was seen operating in the routine and the familiar; the
personal and the intimate.
Eventually, scholars came to recognize that this constitutive
relationship was mutual: as law circulated throughout social
life, it too, was shaped by these encounters ‘on the ground.’
Persons and groups could reject, avoid, appropriate, translate,
or simply ignore the law. In doing so, the content, form, and
reach of law itself was produced. By exposing law’s presence in
everyday interactions, these insights generated considerable
interest in the ways that collective actors could transform law
(McCann, 1994) and how even relatively powerless persons
could resist the force of law through their everyday acts of
resistance (Sarat, 1988; Ewick and Silbey, 1998).
Most recently, scholars have noted the effects of globaliza-
tion and neo-liberal governance on both the meaning of
‘everyday life’ and of ‘law.’ Globalization connotes a particular
configuration of nation-state and capital such that the source
and reach of power are extended to overcome both time and
space. This means, among other things, that power can be
exercised remotely and in such a way as to exceed the contours
of ordinary life. Similarly, globalization challenges the idea of
sovereignty and with it traditional notions of law. In many
ways, globalization has thus disrupted not only the relation-
ship between law and the everyday, it has destabilized the
categories themselves. These developments suggest that it is not
sufficient to simply state that there is a constitutive relationship
between law and everyday life, without specifying the nature of
the relationship or acknowledging that it can wither or be
curtailed. As Engel and Engel observe, in an age of neo-liberal
governance and globalization, “[T]he inactivity of law in the
lives and consciousness of ordinary people may be its most
important feature.” (2010: p. 161). What had been
definitively fixed (initially, that law and the everyday are
separate; subsequently, that they are mutually constitutive)
is now seen to be empirically contingent. Although the
lives of ordinary citizens may be suffused with law and
legal accountability, other actors – such as transnational
corporations – can move across and beyond legal jurisdictions,
effectively floating free of both law and the everyday world on
the ground. Thus, while the law may be ‘all over’ for some
actors (Sarat, 1988) it is not evenly so, nor is it uniform across
time and space. New research in the relationship between law
and everyday life must, then, account for the absence as well
as the presence of law in a globalized world.
See also: Conflict and Conflict Resolution, Social Psychology
of; Dispute Resolutions in Economics; Disputes, Social
Construction and Transformation of; Empirical Legal Studies;
Everyday Life, Anthropology of; Law and Society: Development
of the Field; Legal Culture and Legal Consciousness; Legal
Formalism; Legal Realism; Legal Systems: Private.
Law and Everyday Life 473
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