On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the Law and Society Association initiated the Project on the Second Half Century. Representing a relatively young field of scholarship – at least compared to its constituent disciplines – the Association paused to look back to its origins, mark its progress and chart a path forward. These soundings entailed, among other things: soliciting proposals from junior scholars about directions the field might take in the next fifty years; organizing a series of 50th Anniversary Roundtables at LSA’s 2014 meetings; and posting a selective sample of essays, presidential addresses and journal articles published over the last 50 years reviewing and reflecting on the field of law and society. That sample included 73 pieces, on average about one and a half reviews for every year of the Association’s existence. This level of self?scrutiny may reflect the precariousness and uncertainty that mark the life of an interdisciplinary field committed to inclusiveness. From the beginning law and society was a “big tent” field. According to Garth and Sterling (1998) the Law and Society Association was founded when legal realists challenged legal formalism. The realist challenge was based on the insistence that, given the indeterminacy of law, legal knowledge must go beyond doctrine and include empirical studies of law in action. This challenge within the legal academy coincided with the work of a small group of sociologists who, marginalized by orthodox sociology’s drift toward quantitative approaches and “by the precarious position of law within sociology,” defected from the American Sociological Association and established the Law and Society Association (Garth and Sterling 1998). The marriage of legal realists and social scientists brought together two groups at odds with the orthodoxy of their respective home disciplines and intent on constructing an interdisciplinary study of law and society.