This essay was done as part of a larger bibliographic project on the ethnography of law, begun by Laura Nader and her students at the University of California in the early 1960s. A summary of the results of this project was published in 1966 under the title “The Ethnography of Law: A Bibliographic Survey” (Nader et al., 1966). This work's more than 700 entries surveyed the literature on customary law in seven continental areas—Africa, Asia, the Near East, Europe, Oceania, and the Americas—as they were in 1964-1965. With the help and encouragement of the original compilers, the work of revising and updating the earlier bibliography was begun. This work is still in progress. However, to stimulate further suggestions for the project, we have written this summary of trends in the literature on customary law. The summary retains the division of the earlier bibliography into major continental areas, together with a section on comparative, general, and theoretical works.