Justice, Affect and Legal Change: Preliminary reflections from ongoing research on trials of Crimes against Humanity in Argentina?

LETICIA BARRERA; NOA VAISMAN

Nueva Orleans

Congreso; Law and Society Association Annual Meeting; 2016

Law and Society Association

In this paper, we present a descriptive analysis of interviews with federal trial court judges, both male and female, and of different ages. In these interviews we wanted to interrogate how the process of judging crimes against humanity in Argentina has affected these judges? subjectivities. Specifically we ask: How does the judges? view of themselves change throughout the judicial process? What do they learn from the trials? How do these trials confront their previous ideas about law and justice? Does the human rights ethic promoted by these trials permeate these subjects? understandings of the judiciary and its relation to the making of a democratic society? Although we seek to further the theoretical interest of previous anthropological works on affect and emotions (i.e. Navaro-Yashin 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010) we do not build our analysis on a particular theory of affect and emotion (we do not even try to distinguish them from each other). Instead, based on our ethnographic materials we pay close attention to the context and the information revealed through these judicial proceedings. Furthermore, we seek to situate the judges´ experiences within a larger context of legal change in Argentina that questions the conceptualization, which is deeply-rooted in the native legal culture, of the workings of the judiciary as a depoliticized activity.