Llewellyn (1893–1962) was the most important figure associated with the American Legal Realism of the 1920s and 1930s, which held that the law was indeterminate on the basis of statutes and precedents alone and required study of the how disputes are resolved in practice.
The "sociological" wing of legal realism championed by Llewellyn held that in American law dispute resolution was strongly influenced by norms such as those in mercantile practice.
[1] Llewellyn and Hoebel (1941)[2] went to on to develop a means of determining legal practice from ethnographic description of trouble cases, including mediation and negotiation as well as adjudication.
The behavioral "case study" approach has continued and expanded in later anthropological works such as Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems (2005).
Because "government without law is limited to the administration of services",[4] one of the implications of the legal realist tradition is that it is not necessarily in the capital city that one must look to define the government of a modern nation but to how the law "will develop its shape in the arena of action," "hammered out as specific issues catalyze action for the trouble case at hand".