Transparency, Legal Forms, and Knowledge Relations in judicial practice in Argentina

LETICIA BARRERA

San Francisco, California

Congreso; Law and Society Association Annual Meeting; 2011

Law and Society Association

Following a period of total de-legitimation of the state triggered by the 2001/2 economic crisis, the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice passed a series of regulations aimed at making its workings more transparent. While these reforms were presented by the Court’s critics as a success for NGOs’ activism that gained momentum after crisis, within the Court, however, they were seen as the result of internal pressures for change. Drawing on a series of public hearings held by the Court in a river pollution case with compliance with the new regulations on transparency, this paper proposes to shift the focus away from the question whether the impulse for transparency came from outside or inside the judicial apparatus. Instead, I approach transparency in an ethnographic mode, through the aesthetics of legal forms at work in the Court; aesthetics that lends transparency a performative, staged-for-an audience aspect. In doing so, I seek to show how the Court’s visibility works on the actors’ subjectivities producing particular forms of practices and even new subjects. But also, in taking transparency as an actual tool of legal knowledge-making, I seek to replicate the aesthetics of instrumentality that I observed in judicial practice—the means and ends relationship embedded in legal technicalities (Riles 2005)—as a means to advance my own ethnographic knowledge.