The Conclusion summarizes and discusses the book’s three main contributions to the law and society literature. These contributions include providing a new perspective into the paradoxical effects of law on daily survival, bringing the notion of precarity into a sharper focus in studies of disadvantaged and marginalized citizens, and providing a critical view of law in regimes governed by authoritarian or dictatorial rule. The Conclusion suggests that people’s struggles against precarity and the aftereffects of their behavior are shaped by the following factors: The (mis)match between law and other sets of values and understandings of justice, legal ambiguity and the prevalence of informal processes and practices, and the regulatory and normative role of the state. The book ends with a critical review of the literature on legal precarity, and a discussion of the benefits that the sociolegal perspective will offer to the broader research agenda on global precarity.

The Introduction sets out the core puzzle of the book, its central question and argument, and the research setting. It begins with a brief story about a Vietnamese female worker’s struggle to make ends meet, and her attempt to withdraw her pension early to meet pressing family demands. The anecdote raises a striking issue about the paradoxical nature of citizens’ use of the law, or resistance to it, in their daily life: While their behaviour represents an attempt to overcome certain conditions of uncertainty and instability in work and life, their action ironically puts them in another challenging, precarious situation. This chapter introduces the notion of precarity and outlines key elements of the conceptual framework that shed light on the mutual relationship between precarity and law as developed from the author's ethnographic observations of Vietnamese low-income workers and residents.

This chapter critically engages with relevant legal consciousness literature and develops the conceptual framework of the book. It examines three accounts of law in everyday life – hegemony, alienation, and empowerment – and demonstrates their limitations in explaining the mixed, paradoxical effects of law observed through the experiences of interviewed workers and residents in Vietnam. The ethnographic approach adopted in this research foregrounds the complex nature of individuals’ life circumstances and their decision-making. The concept of precarity as applied in this book consists of three main components: Precarity as a phenomenon and result of the broader neoliberal economic structure, precarity as multifaceted and variegated individual experiences, and precarity as a ground of resistance. This chapter develops a three-pronged process that underpins the mutually reinforcing relationship between precarity and law, and identifies some of the factors that make a socialist country like Vietnam a suitable setting to explore such a relationship.

Legal consciousness refers to the ways in which people think and act in relation to law, including situations in which they view law as relevant and useful and those in which they reject law or never consider it at all. Some of the earliest law and society research in Asia—in Japan, Korea, and Indonesia, for example—attempted to explore the phenomenon of legal consciousness at the national level. Typically, such research depicted Asians as law-averse and non-litigious, but subsequently those characterizations were challenged and revised by scholars who proposed more complex explanations for the infrequency of litigation in some Asian societies. The readings in this chapter follow the evolution in legal consciousness research, from efforts to identify national traits to studies that examine the interaction of globalization and customary practices to produce unique forms of consciousness within different social groupings. The readings also explore the ways in which official definitions of rights are refracted through the lens of legal consciousness. The chapter concludes with a look at recent law and society studies that take a less individualistic approach to rights and emphasize instead the relational dimensions of legal consciousness.

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of state-building as lawfare. The chapter starts by outlining the building blocks of peripheral state-building: legal pluralism, nested sovereignty, gender cleavage, and armed conflict. Legal pluralism is an issue of fragmented social control. State–society struggles for social control are complicated because both the state and society are internally divided. The concept of nested sovereignty captures how the state is divided in imperial and federal settings. The central societal cleavage of state-building lawfare is gender. Both political and societal cleavages that drive state-building lawfare in the periphery are actualized and intensified by armed conflict. Building on this foundation, the chapter then theorizes state-building lawfare from above. In particular, it outlines when and why central and peripheral authorities promote non-state legal systems, as well as how conflict changes the political rationale of promoting legal pluralism. After that, the chapter interrogates state-building lawfare from below – focusing on individual choices between state and non-state legal systems. It also speculates about how conflict transforms the driving forces behind these choices – in identities and social norms – as well as resources, interests, and hierarchies, with a special focus on gender relations.

This chapter presents a descriptive account of legal pluralism in contemporary Chechnya. It describes the actors in charge of dispute resolution – the elders and religious authorities, as well as judges, prosecutors, and lawyers – and the most common disputes, and their forms of resolution. This chapter shows that an alternative legal system has evolved into a hybrid legal order, one characterized by judges in state courts sometimes implementing customary and religious norms, while imams and elders participate in state court hearings as witnesses or experts. Relying on original survey evidence, the chapter explores the factors that drive individual preferences for alternative legal systems. This analysis uncovers the role of gender, generational divides, education and social class, and ethnic and religious identities. Finally, the chapter outlines the political topography of Chechnya: uneven patterns of the use of state law across cleavages between urban and rural areas, the Russified northern region and mountainous areas in the south, and finally between the eastern region, which constitutes the core of Kadyrov’s regime, and the less tightly controlled western Chechnya.

Chapter 6 turns to the subject of 'private enforcement', which in East Asia is uneven and inadequate. It discusses this through the lens of ‘litigation culture’, or rather the culture of non-litigiousness. Claims of non-litigiousness in East Asia, and above all in Japan, have been fiercely contested by scholars. Yet the subject is nuanced; the impact of non-adversarialism has not simply been ‘debunked’. In the context of this debate, the chapter examines factors that have limited the development of consumer antitrust claims. Consistent with the value of social harmony and the ancient authoritarianism that prioritizes social stability, methods of mediation and conciliation have been favoured over court conflict. Under the influence of this tradition, private parties have often been encouraged to settle their differences. Deviating from this tradition, the chapter highlights Korea, where recent legislative developments are producing, at least on paper, stronger litigation incentives. Overall, the view is expressed that, where cultural factors contribute to non-adversarialism, thereby leading to a deficit in the vindication of private claims, it appears that cultural messaging and a shift in norms may assist in unlocking the potential of legal and procedural reforms that reduce institutional barriers and activate economic incentives.

The chapter argues that fieldwork – specifically multi-sited, semi-structured interviews and participant observation – is uniquely suited for unpacking how the constraints of daily practice within national courts frustrate the subnational reach of the European Union's (EU) legal authority. Deriving methodological insights and practical lessons from fifteen months of fieldwork in Italian, French, and German courts, the author shows how fieldwork reveals judges to be neither solely driven by individual attitudes nor by strategic quests for power: they are also employees within a bureaucracy. Anchored by the demands of established practice, knowledge, and everyday work, judges can develop an institutionally rooted consciousness resisting disruptive confrontations with new and unfamiliar rules like EU law. Through on-site iteration and triangulation, field researchers can trace, unpack, and corroborate this consciousness in real time, with an eye to also hypothesizing the conditions under which resistances to Europeanizing change can be overcome. In so doing, the researcher can intercept what one judge referred to as a ‘bureaucratic silence’ within which EU law ‘dies’: A web of habitual institutional practices scarcely detectable via other modes of social inquiry.

If the judicial construction of Europe was not catalyzed by innately activist judges, who were the pioneers of change? Focusing on the 1960s-early 1980s, Chapter 5 introduces the first Euro-lawyers: A vanguard of independent-minded WWII survivors who sought to unite Europe via bottom-up lawyering. Less institutionally constrained than judges, they nonetheless had to erode ubiquitous knowledge deficits and habits embodied by courts and clients. To this end, they cultivated local litigants and disputes exposing national barriers to European integration; constructed test cases to introduce local judges to European rules they hardly knew; cajoled their interlocutors to solicit the ECJ by ghostwriting their referrals; and thus generated opportunities for the ECJ to render pathbreaking judgments. The chapter combines oral history interviews, materials from the ECJ and lawyers’ personal archives, secondary historiographies and newspaper records, and geocoded data of the first referrals to the ECJ. The chapter speaks to readers seeking a new perspective on the origins of European integration, the creativity and mischievousness of strategic litigation, how lawyers cultivate the rights-consciousness of litigants and the activism of judges, and how individuals promote novel practices that cut against imagined possibilities.

Chapters 7 unpacks how lawyers can serve as brokers of compliance when controversial judicial decisions spark backlash. As European integration became politicized from the 1990s onwards, disruptive European Union (EU) laws and European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions have often provoked on-the-ground resistance. Yet these controversies can also open surprising opportunities for court-driven change, provided that Euro-lawyers mobilize as "interpretive mediators:" Public advocates who vernacularize EU law and rally local stakeholders and the press to promote compliance. The chapter develops a case study design to compare lawyers' role in two explosive controversies that generated litigation before the ECJ: The 1991 Port of Genoa case (analyzed in this Chapter), which quashed the control over port labor of a centenarian union of dockworkers, and the 2015 Xylella case (analyzed in Chapter 8), which mandated the eradication of thousands of centenarian olive trees. The chapter traces how Euro-lawyers in the Port of Genoa case preempted backlash and promoted compliance by mobilizing public and interest group support via media savvy advocacy. It speaks to readers interested in how contentious politics transform legal mobilization, how lawyers cultivate people's legal consciousness when the law is politicized, and how these efforts shape judicial policymaking and Europeanization.

Chapter 6 traces the evolution and corporatization of Euro-lawyering. The repertoire of court-driven change developed by the first Euro-lawyers only took root where a broader array of practitioners came to perceive it as professionally advantageous. Since the 1980s, a rising network of "Euro-firms" took charge of Euro-lawyering to tend to a corporate, transnational clientele in global cities. Conversely, in more resource-scarce client markets where lawyers are balkanized into generalists, practitioners perceive mobilizing European law as impractical - something one does elsewhere. Since the only national courts routinely solicited to apply EU law and solicit the ECJ are in cities where Euro-firms cluster, the judicial construction of Europe has evolved as patch-worked ecology hollowed by black holes. The chapter leverages geospatial analysis and comparative fieldwork across five cities where Euro-lawyering corporatized– Rome, Milan, Paris, Hamburg and Munich – and four cities where it never took root – Palermo, Naples, Bari, and Marseille. Readers curious about how lawyers rework economic and spatial inequities into place-based identities, how these identities refract access to courts and the promise of judicial policymaking, and how repertoires of legal mobilization are co-opted and corporatized will find this chapter of interest.