We read ethnographic studies for a variety of reasons, but for most purposes a first requirement is that we understand what knowledge claims the author is making, and on what grounds. Abusing Justice would be a naive argument that the social class differential between magistrates and defendants was in itself the key issue in the 'objectification' of the defendants and the creation of punitive justice. The clearest evidence that the social distance structurally present between judges and judged affects court procedures concerns Countyside officials' development of a full-blown thesis about the nature of poor families and their 'criminal' way of life. This chapter tries to get over the obvious methodological difficulties of demonstrating the impact of social class on the administration of justice by using qualitative data taken from three sources. Ethnographers are also often not clear about whether they are using theoretical inference or empirical generalisation to link their findings to their conclusions about the focus of the research.