This collection of essays aims to introduce the research questions pursued by ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis offer a distinctive approach towards the study of law and legal institutions, throught their focus on everyday talk and action, and the detailed content of occupational activities. Ethnomethodological ethnographers, in what has become known as the studies-of-work tradition, have studied the ""practical reasoning"" constituting different varieties of legal work. Conversation analysts, employing a research methodology which is based upon the analysis of audio-recordings of naturally occuring interaction, have examined how the day-to-day business of legal settings is conducted through everyday talk.;Both approaches are distinctive in that they offer a re-specification of political and philosophical debates about law, through examining the practical actions which accomplish law as a social phenomenon.