Sally Engle Merry reports in her book Getting Justice and Getting Even on an ethnographic study of a class of people who have taken their problems to court. The author states that the reason for the book is to discuss people who take their personal problems to court and to discuss the legal consciousness that causes them to do so. The setting for the study is eastern Massachusetts in the early 1980s, and the people are primarily white working-class Americans, largely but not entirely women. These are people who have decided that the legal system has something to offer them. They have taken the initiative to bring their problem to court. Most of the cases are from the lower criminal courts, some from the juvenile courts, and others from the small-claims courts. The legal services involved are generally free to the public. The author states that she has used an ethnographic approach to explore the legal consciousness of these plaintiffs and to observe and report on the way the different parties, the mediators, and the court officials talk about law, rights, property problems and cases.
The methodology undertaken was observation and interview, though the emphasis is on observation. Merry stats that she found unraveling the histories and settings of the conflicts involved a complex task, and in order to accomplish her task she has gathered information from a variety of sources, cross-checking to determine accuracy. The parties themselves are attempting to have a conflict decided in their favor, so they will present themselves in the best possible light and may omit or distort information which puts their actions in a more questionable light. Parties may also honestly hold different opinions and interpretations about what happened and what it meant. Merry begins by observing as much of the court proceedings as she can. She talks to the parties themselves during the course of the case, visits the neighborhood where the confl...