Place, Access, and Law-Making: Toward a Topography of Legal Knowledge in Argentina's Supreme Court

LETICIA BARRERA

Montreal

Congreso; Law and Society Association Annual Meeting; 2008

Law and Society Association

Legal settings, such as courtrooms, have usually played a central role in socio-legal accounts of courts’ decision-making processes (e.g. Arendt 1963; Yngvesson 1993; Garapon 1997; Ginzburg 1999; Peletz 2002; Hajjar 2005). This paper follows this tradition, while borrowing from approaches prevalent in Science and Technology Studies to re-situate “place” within the legal process. Accordingly, this paper elaborates on the relationship between the notions of place observed within the Argentine Supreme Court and access to the institution’s knowledge practices. It draws on the Court’s spatial aspects—infrastructure; appearance; space internal distribution; etc.— and the observation of institutional and individual practices that “create” and “perform” the Court (e.g. circulation of files; public hearings; use of certiorari). The composite, I argue, enacts a set of relations that mirror the Court’s decision-making process. This analogy between place and access can be interpreted as a visual metaphor that describes the intricate path toward judicial law-making practices and reflects my ethnographic access to the institution. But more importantly, this aesthetic tool can be also understood and managed analytically; thus, it can be turned into an object of theoretical inquiry (Riles 2005). This paper engages in this move; and, ultimately, it seeks to reflect that the notions and senses of place that I encountered in the field are part of the network through which the legal is created (Latour 2002; Levi and Valverde forthcoming 2008), rather than a fixed locality external to the law.