THOMAS SCHEFFER is Heisenberg Scholar at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, and previously led the law-in-action Research Group at the Free University Berlin. He has conducted ethnographic and discourse analytical research on migration control, social work, legal casework, and parliamentary inquiries. His research interests include micro-sociology, sociology of knowledge, and cultural comparison. Scheffer is spokesperson of the section 'sociology of law' in the German Sociological Association. KATI HANNKEN-ILLJES is a Senior Lecturer at the Department for German Linguistics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany. Her research focuses on legal rhetoric, the relation of narrating and arguing and the didactics of teaching interpersonal communication. ALEXANDER KOZIN is Research Fellow at Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany. His areas of specialization include communication studies, phenomenology, translation theory, semiotics, and law and society. Currently, he is working on a project that examines criminal law in relation to 'subjects with limited culpability'.