This text was written on the occasion of the workshop Ethnography and Law: Methods and Challenges in Times of Crisis, held at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg on 2 and 3 July 2026. It first appeared in German in RECHTS|EMPIRIE on 21 August 2026 under the title "Wie viele Veranstaltungen machen ein Feld? Gedanken zur Institutionalisierung der sozio-juridischen Forschung in Deutschland anlässlich des Workshops ‚Ethnography and Law' in Hamburg" (https://rechtsempirie.de/10.25527/10.25527.re.2026.02/wie-viele-veranstaltungen-machen-ein-feld/), distributed under a CC BY 4.0 licence. What follows is the author's own English version.
There is a well-known and, more recently, very well documented paradox in German socio-legal research: the country that gave the world Max Weber, Eugen Ehrlich and Niklas Luhmann has proved unable to institutionalise the field those authors helped to found. There is not a single chair in the sociology of law in any sociology department; in law faculties the discipline figures on paper as a foundational subject and in practice as a footnote; there are no dedicated graduate programmes, and building an academic career on empirical legal research remains, at best, a risky venture (Boulanger, Creutzfeldt & Hendry 2026). The standard diagnosis: an „institutionally precarious“ field.
Against this backdrop, the workshop Ethnography and Law: Methods and Challenges in Times of Crisis, held in Hamburg on 2 and 3 July, deserves to be read not merely as one more successful academic event (and it was an excellent one), but as an episode in the construction of a field. Organised by a coalition that is telling in itself (the Vereinigung für Recht und Gesellschaft, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (HIS), the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA), the German Sociological Association (DGS) and the University of Hamburg), the workshop brought together researchers from a range of disciplines, among them anthropology, sociology, law and political science, from different countries and different legal cultures.
Betting on method
The fragile development of the field in Germany says nothing about the creativity and quality of the research conducted here. One factor that has, in my view, contributed considerably to this state of affairs is competition with other „studies“ (gender studies, urban studies, critical race studies and so on). Their open structure produces overlaps with socio-legal questions, and hence competition for people: anyone working empirically on law can just as easily locate themselves in one of those fields. That many do has less to do with intellectual affinity than with academic biographies. Established fields offer what an unestablished one cannot: journals, interlocutors, prospects of appointment, in short a minimum of professional predictability. The potential members of a socio-legal studies community in Germany are therefore already bound to other academic identities (on the formation of gender studies as an academic field see Hark 2005; on comparable dynamics in the neurosciences as an emergent field, Strotmann 2025). The event thus addressed precisely the diagnosed gap: it orchestrates and proclaims this community, which, by naming itself, performs exactly what is demanded of it, namely to explore the potential of ethnographic methods for the study of law as a social phenomenon.
The most interesting decision behind the workshop was, to my mind, to organise it around a method rather than an object. The temptation to cut the field thematically (migration, climate, digital platforms) is understandable and often productive, but it tends to fragment the conversation into niches. Placing ethnography at the centre did something else: it forced lawyers, sociologists and anthropologists to discuss shared (or precisely not shared) epistemological premises rather than results alone. At the same time, the potential and the limits of ethnographic methods became concretely tangible. Kari Anne Drangsland showed in her paper how judges at two German administrative courts deal with the 2025 „Greece decision“ of the Federal Administrative Court, a ruling premised on the assumption that refugees can support themselves in the informal economy. How judges interpret this instruction, how they relate to it affectively and what it means for their „Greek cases“ is visible neither in written judgments nor in statistics; ethnographically, it is. The limits emerged just as clearly: Kerstin Eppert and Franca Heuer reported from the court ethnography of a terrorism trial on unequal access to the field, on secrecy rules that determine what can be observed at all, and on an ethical calibration that has to be renewed continuously. Precisely where state action grips hardest, the field is most likely to close.
This wager, building a workshop around a procedure rather than an object, has an additional point in the German context. Of all empirical methods, ethnography is perhaps the one that challenges the traditional legal self-understanding most radically. Legal doctrine operates by isolating the text: law as an autonomous system of concepts, capable of producing rational results through an objective method, shielded from the „contaminations“ of the social. Ethnography performs exactly the opposite movement. It insists that law happens somewhere: among people, documents, affects, courtrooms, corridors and, in the limit case, volcanoes (cf. Latour 2016). A survey or a quantitative analysis of court decisions can still be domesticated by the dominant legal culture as „auxiliary data“; ethnography cannot. It shifts the question of what law even is.
The panels demonstrated this with remarkable breadth. There were ethnographies of the places where one expects to find law: the Berlin labour court (Alina Zurmühlen), Danish courtrooms and the materiality of media evidence (Louise Victoria Johansen), criminal proceedings on intimate partner violence in Austria (Julia Struppe-Schanda), trials for international crimes under the principle of universal jurisdiction (Sophie Konrad). But there was also a systematic effort to displace the gaze: „life in the cracks“ of everyday Haiti (Marco Motta), moot courts as sites for the production of legal authority in pre-war Russia (Grigory Gorbun), the „fugitive“ ethnography with people holding Duldung status in Germany (Aino Korvensyrjä) and, as the most consistent extension of this movement, the „interview with a volcano“ (Bertram Turner) on more-than-human normativity in the Anthropocene. The methodological message is clear: one does not know in advance where law counts, how it counts, or whether it counts at all.
Socio-legal cultures and the problem of the British mirror
The workshop also sent me back, with a certain productive unease, to the comparative literature on socio-legal cultures. Recent work (I am thinking above all of the research agenda on socio-legal trajectories) has rendered a valuable service by showing that the development, or non-development, of national socio-legal communities cannot be explained monocausally by legal tradition, but follows from intellectual histories, academic political economies, epistemic communities and individual trajectories. If one likes, one can read this as an application of the older insight that disciplines are not only cognitive but also social and cultural formations, whose development depends on institutional conditions (more on this here).
Thinking in terms of socio-legal cultures is undoubtedly an advance. Yet the most common comparative design carries a risk: taking the United Kingdom as the yardstick. When the UK serves as the mirror, with its research centres, its established journals, its socio-legal career track and even the ambivalent but real legitimating effect of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the periodic state evaluation of British research performance, Germany can only appear as a lack: no chairs, no programmes, no career, no field. The diagnosis is correct, but the yardstick conditions the imagination. Measured against it, the only conceivable path for the German field is belated convergence with the British model of institutionalisation.
The problem runs deeper, and it concerns the German academic landscape as a whole: interdisciplinarity is demanded programmatically, but its costs are individualised. Whoever takes it seriously pays biographically, in appointment procedures that ask about disciplinary fit, in learned societies that presuppose belonging. Legal scholarship is only the clearest example: it is disciplined in the strict sense of the word, constituted as a discipline (Foucault sends his regards), organised around the state examination, the reproduction of a doctrinally shaped teaching staff and a reputational hierarchy that remains firmly doctrinal. To expect it to bring forth centres and chairs on the British model from within would be to expect the structure to work against itself. More productive, it seems to me, is the reverse question: not when these barriers will fall, but which forms of development of a socio-legal field are possible under precisely these conditions.
A field made of events?
Here I return to the title. If the British route of institutionalisation through centres and departments is blocked in Germany for the time being, what was on display in Hamburg points to another possible morphology: a field constructed laterally, through coalitions between scholarly associations, non-university institutes (the Max Planck Institutes, the HIS) and niches within universities; a field that exists less as a structure than as a network actualised intermittently, in workshops, in working groups, in journal special issues. In short, a field in the making.
This has obvious costs: networks without institutional anchors create no positions, train no doctoral students in any significant number and guarantee no generational reproduction. No accumulation of workshops replaces a chair. One error would therefore be to see a field already present in such events. The other, equally tempting, would be to dismiss them as mere palliatives. For they do work that formal structures alone do not: they publicly perform the existence of a community, create a shared vocabulary between disciplines that rarely read one another and, in the case of ethnography, place at the centre of the conversation precisely the method that the dominant legal culture can least assimilate without transforming itself in the process.
How many events make a field? Taken on their own: none. But perhaps the question is wrongly posed, inherited from a British image of what a field has to be. If the German path must be a different one, more networked, more interinstitutional and more reliant on encounters like the one in Hamburg, then each of these events is not a precarious substitute for institutionalisation: it is the form that institutionalisation may have to take here.