ABSTRACT
We would like to begin the second part of this book with an empirically documented investigation of the entirely situated, contextual nature of legal activity. The foregoing chapters amply demonstrated that ethnomethodology rejects any attempt at formalization identifying the characters and properties of an action or a speech act independently of the context in which it is deployed and the infinite variety of configurations contained within that context. Now, we will show how law is produced and practiced in context, i.e. in a way that cannot be explained independently of contingencies related to time, place, membership, and the sequential course of the action under consideration. At the same time, the ethnomethodological requirement that action be contextualized creates a number of concrete difficulties. In this chapter, we will seek first to show how important it is to locate legal action in context. We will look at the institutional context of such action, and endeavour to emphasize that its occurrence must not be postulated, but rather described on the basis of empirically demonstrated manifestations of its relevance.
