Although Law and Society has matured as a field, many scholars remain driven by curiosity to undertake “exploratory” projects, seeking to open up the world of practices in varied settings for legal interaction. Environment and Enforcement was written on particular new ground, at a time when “regulation” – now, Keith Hawkins notes, something of “an orthodoxy” in sociolegal studies – was just starting to receive scholars' attention, particularly in Britain. In such a wide-open context, the qualities of an exploratory project are taken to the extreme, where one may lack both theoretical touchstones and specific fieldwork models to build on.

Participant observation can be particularly well suited to revealing the unknown. When Keith Hawkins was presented with the opportunity to undertake the empirical study of environmental enforcement, he had already been converted to qualitative fieldwork for the kinds of knowledge it produced. His background in criminology in an oddly helpful way set up Hawkins to undertake the “anthropological” frame of mind: to assume the veneer of the ignorant but interested and innocent outsider. Unlike Robert Kagans project on Regulatory Justice (see Chapter 3), Hawkins was not a “participant” in the literal sense but rather an observer who would spend months observing the routines of regulatory encounters.

Lacking a clear expectation for what one might find in the field is not the same as being unguided by a clear objective. Hawkins's first reflections – about how he arrived at his project after a decade of interest in other legal topics – drives home the recognition of important, general questions at the heart of Law and Society research.