FieldWork and Ethnographic Methods in Legal Sociology: Practical Dilemmas and Local Improvement

As a core empirical research tool in legal sociology, legal ethnography has been introduced into domestic academia through social science-oriented legal studies, providing an immersive research approach for observing law in practice. Distinct from doctrinal jurisprudence that focuses on normative texts, field-based legal ethnography employs participant observation, in-depth interviews, and thick description of cases, effectively revealing the gaps between written legal norms and their practical implementation. Drawing upon both domestic and international academic traditions alongside recent frontier research, this study acknowledges that while legal ethnography in China has achieved considerable empirical progress, it continues to encounter methodological challenges. These include rigidly defined research fields, the oversimplification of indigenous experiences through Western theoretical frameworks, validity concerns arising from respondents' performative behaviors, ethical considerations, and barriers to disciplinary acceptance within jurisprudence. Grounded in authoritative empirical literature and illustrative case studies, this paper adopts a problem-analysis-solution framework to systematically examine the practical difficulties encountered in the localized application of legal ethnography. It proposes optimized pathways encompassing the expansion of fieldwork boundaries, the reconstruction of the relationship between theory and empirical experience, the establishment of multi-source verification mechanisms, the standardization of research ethics, and the promotion of reciprocal dialogue between empirical observation and normative analysis. Through these measures, the study aims to construct a localized legal ethnography paradigm that is well-suited to China's contemporary legal practice and governance development.