Introduction: Taking New Legal Realism to Transnational Issues and Institutions

This introductory comment uses the two articles ("Institutional Vulnerability and Opportunity: Immigration and America's 'War on Terror" and "New Legal Realism and the Ethnography of Transnational Law") that follow to examine the new legal realism (NLR) as a tool for studying transnational phenomena. The NLR is both descriptive and programmatic. Accordingly, the two articles can be used to draw attention to important features characteristic of the NLR and also to promote a program of research that will build on those features and extend them into further analyses and new domains, We seek a general agreement but also a lively debate about where the approach should go and what to emphasize. Adapted from the source document.