Having reached a certain degree of maturity as a field, Law and Society may not appear to offer much “low-hanging fruit” – topics ripe for examination and easily within reach. Whereas Stuart Macaulay, as recorded in the first interview in this collection, made an enduring contribution by asking local companies about their understanding and use of “contracts,” after a half-century of work, seemingly no field of law can be said to be truly bereft of critical, social scientific examination. New advances in the field, by this accounting, must stand on the shoulders of others: filling in ever-smaller gaps in the field, employing creative reinterpretations, or deploying innovative project designs. The student or young scholar today, wondering where to “make one's mark,” may look with a hint of jealousy on the prior generation of scholars who had so much new ground to plow.

Yet the last interview in this book shows the preceding account to be too dour. Setting aside the question of whether scholars have even fully mined the potential in the local aspect, since the 1970s, John Hagan for one, saw the vast potential in giving Law and Society global horizons. As Dezalay and Garth (Chapter 18) and Braithwaite and Drahos (Chapter 21) likewise appreciated, a changing society reshapes “the law,” from its identities to its institutions. A globalizing world gives scholars today an even more significant opportunity to be present at the creation of a whole new genus of legal developments. With Justice in the Balkans, global developments finally caught up with Hagan's latent interest in the international dimensions of criminal justice.