Legal knowledge refers to the ensemble of forms of knowing, theorizing, judging, analyzing, and reflecting that constitute the practices of legal actors. The study of legal knowledge treats all of these practices, and all of the “knowledge work” of different categories of legal actors, from police officers, ordinary litigants, and expert witnesses to judges, on the same plane, as one field of social action. It asks what is distinctive about the kind of thought that takes place in the legal realm as opposed, for example, to other spheres of social life, such as science, art, or philosophical work. It asks also what is different about the character of legal knowledge from one institutional or cultural context to the next; what happens to legal knowledge when ...

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