ABSTRACT
It is widely acknowledged that the contextual appreciation of law and legal processes within different legal cultures and across legal jurisdictional boundaries is problematic, and that, as Hodgson (2000, p.141) puts it, may create only ‘an illusion of understanding’. Whilst theoretical postulates and their methodological imperatives are never value-free, the balance between phenomenology and social reality (i.e. what counts as an epistemologically valid explanation) must lie in the extent to which there is agreement as to what constitutes ‘objective fact’ or ‘objectivity’.1
