Through interviews with many of the most noteworthy authors in law and society, Conducting Law and Society Research takes students and scholars behind the scenes of empirical scholarship, showing the messy reality of research methods. The challenges and the uncertainties, so often missing from research methods textbooks, are revealed in candid detail. These accessible and revealing conversations about the lived reality of classic projects will be a source of encouragement and inspiration to those embarking on empirical research, ranging across the full array of disciplines that contribute to law and society. For all of the ambiguities and challenges to the social 'scientific' study of law, the reflections found in this book - collectively capturing a portrait of the field through the window of the research efforts - individually remind readers that 'good research' displays not an absence of problems, but the care taken in negotiating them.

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Competing ethno-centered strategies over the local fiscal resources can seriously undermine political and economic stability of ethnically diverse societies. This study investigates the causal link between ethnic diversity and local government finances by focusing on the case of Macedonia. In particular: whether fiscal decentralization is used as a part of broader strategy for prevention and mitigation of inter-ethnic conflicts. The main argument is that low level of political culture and inter-ethnic tensions are frustrating the development of the government policy along a course of decentralization. The study confronts two emerging scenarios regarding decentralization and inter-ethnic relations. The first scenario puts the economic development at the forefront for country’s stability and treats decentralisation as a driving force to achieve this goal. Ethnic problems are expected to be solved along this path as rising economic stability reduces the inter-ethnic tensions. In the second scenario, the inter-ethnic stability is the main pillar of the country’s stability, which is expected to be accomplished through decentralisation. The paper analyses and synthesizes pros and cons of two scenarios from administrative, legal, political and economic perspectives.

The prevailing definition of a “swing voter” on the Supreme Court, set out in a landmark 1990 article in The Journal of Politics and unchallenged ever since, establishes an unreasonably high standard for determining whether a Justice truly fits that critical role. This article critiques existing methods of identifying swing voting and advances a revised methodology, which is then applied to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decisionmaking patterns on the current Court. In the case of free speech decisions in particular, we find that Kennedy epitomizes an alternative form of the “swing voter,” veering off from his more natural bloc in that important subset of cases.

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