Abstract
Law's interaction with other values in culture and society is two-fold. The rights - and thus also the nature of law - are being constantly negotiated in parliament, in everyday life, before the courts or other diverse legal authorities, within academia etc.
Furthermore, law touches on almost every area of social life, and so - to use Mauss's words - we should see it as a total social fact.4 Since law can offer a simple refl ection of most social phenomena, anthropologists might see the study law as offering perfect insight into a culture. Our endeavour, however, aims further.
The authors of this volume have tried to contribute to the project of law and legal scholarship as a "genuine discipline", and not as a mere "legal craft" or legal dogmatics, at a time when the dominant view at law schools around the world is that law is no more than a technique. For these reasons, the authors present their own research projects (or parts thereof) in order to show important implications both for law and the social sciences, and to open or re-open doors to various fi elds of study related to law that have been forgotten by academia, or perhaps had never even been recognised as a possible subject matter or have been mentioned only briefl y by a few past authors.