ABSTRACT
It may seem presumptuous to include here a detailed interpretation of legislation and case law. Is this not better left to the lawyers whose training and daily practice are devoted to precisely that? Yet an ethnography of some distant region which adopted, but never analysed, the most fundamental concepts of its subjects of study would be viewed as grossly inadequate, and as Latour and Woolgar point out, precisely the same should apply to technical terms employed by members of professional groups nearer home. Morison and Leith rightly bemoan the fact that most sociological studies of law merely skirt its periphery because they stop short of addressing its ‘substantive’ aspects (1992: 155).
