Cases are not objects at hand for legal decision-making; cases are not echoes from a past crime. Cases are, first of all, made within compound discourse apparatus, here the English Crown Court and the procedure/s attached to it. This book reveals the legal production of cases including their relevant features. The socio-legal ethnography visits the natural sites of adversarial case-making: law firms, barristers' chambers, and Crown Courts. It examines the role and dynamics of client-lawyer meetings, pre-trial hearings, plea bargaining sessions, and jury trials. It focuses on the lawyers' case-making activities, their procedural contexts, and the resulting cases. As an ethnographic discourse study, the book develops a trans-sequential perspective on the interrelated events and processes of case-making - and by doing so, overcomes the shortcomings of talk-bias and text-bias. The trans-sequential approach pays out in detailed case studies on an alibi, on guilt, or the barrister's notes; it pays out as well in cross-case studies dealing with legal care, procedural infrastructure, or the case system in the common law tradition.

We have come a long way from Evans-Pritchard's famous dictum that "there is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method - and that is impossible." Yet a good 40 years later, qualitative social inquiry still has an uneasy relationship with comparison. This volume sets out "thick comparison" as a means to revive "comparing" as a productive process in ethnographic work: a process that helps to revitalise the articulation work inherent in analytical ethnographies; to vary observer perspectives and point towards "blind spots;" to name and create "new things" and modes of empirical work and to give way to intensified dialogues between data analysis and theorizing. Contributors are Katrin Amelang, Stefan Beck, Kati Hannken-Illjes, Alexander Kozin, Henriette Langstrup, Joerg Niewoehner, Thomas Scheffer, Robert Schmidt, Estrid Sorensen, and Britt Ross Winthereik.