Knowledge about Law

Abstract

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 workof different categories of legal actors, from police officers to ordinary litigants to expert witnesses to judges, on the same plane, as one field of social action. This encyclopedia entry describes the intellectual context of the emerging focus on legal knowledge in socio-legal studies and legal theory, its historical antecedents, and key themes.