Where is law most “in action” in society? Very often, it seems, where it is difficult if not impossible to observe directly. Courtrooms can be observed, though private offices can hide bargaining and discretion. Judges may provide written opinions, but their psychology remains a black box. And so it goes. For scholars of the legal profession, a significant obstacle to penetrating law's power has been the office door, behind which lawyers and clients engage in dialogue, bound by the claim of “lawyer–client privilege.” But all the clues received from aggregate data to anecdotal evidence, not to mention academic instinct, drove researchers to break down these barriers.

Bill Felstiner and Austin Sarat, among those who succeeded in challenging the bound-aries, found a wealth of data in the interactions of divorce lawyers and their clients. On the path to Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients, Felstiner and Sarat confronted the scientist's paradox that observation itself may change the behavior of the observed – and the subsequent problem that the publication further exposes to embarrassment or critique what was once hidden. In a number of ways, this research project could have been stifled by obedience to the most formal or cautious standards for research ethics. It may be easy to conclude that the lessons of this book validate their judgments, but it offers an opportunity to consider whether the ends of observational research into legal phenomenon always justify the means.