Our understanding of the role of law in society has been shaped powerfully by research from exotic locales or unfamiliar cultures. The classic anthropological studies of conflict and disputing, in particular, looked to the Tobrianders of Papua New Guinea, the Tiv of northern Nigeria, and the Barotse of Zimbabwe. In the past few decades, however, Law and Society scholars have focused on notionally “familiar” settings closer to home, such as David Engel's journeys to Sander County (Chapter 8), Carol Greenhouse's study of Hopewell, Georgia (Chapter 10), and Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey's examination of four New Jersey counties (Chapter 19). How well does the past generation's methodological and analytical toolbox travel? The importance of that question stretches well beyond the work of anthropologists, but to all researchers seeking out new settings in which to test and develop theory.

For Getting Justice and Getting Even, Sally Merry drove to the urban communities of Massachusetts, but the journey only began there. Intellectually, her working hypotheses utterly failed to explain what she was finding on the ground. Methodologically, a large urban setting challenged the received approach to ethnography. Yet, a tension between a received framework and a new situation is an invitation to creativity. In this interview, Merry reflects on the conceptual and methodological puzzles she confronted, her resolution of which advanced our understanding of the power of legal consciousness. In her prior research she had found that youths in a low-income housing project, many involved in crime, were going to court to fight one another. At a time when alternative dispute resolution (ADR) was expanding, she was primed to think about the uses of law in American cities.