The Imagined Court and the Actual Court: Imaginaries of Judicial Practice among Legal Experts in Argentina

LETICIA BARRERA

Nueva York

Congreso; XXXIV International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association; 2016

Latin American Studies Association

This essay elaborates on disparate and even contradictory understandings and perceptions of the Supreme Court?s workings that I encountered among experts within the field of judicial practice in Argentina in the course of a long-term ethnographic study (from August 2005 to June 2008) on the forms and practices of knowledge formation and circulation within the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice (Barrera 2012a). In accounting for different views of the Court?s workings and judicial practice that play out in my field site, this essay also highlights the relationship between the subjects? conceptualizations, experiences, and perceptions of justice and their positions vis-à-vis the judicial apparatus. Rather than question such representations, in this paper I propose to use them as the ground to reflect on the mode in which knowledge of law and legal institutions is constructed. In doing so, I ultimately try to advance different analytical possibilities to approach the workings of the judiciary in the Argentine legal field seeking to move beyond dichotomies such as modern/pre-modern, objective/subjective, stable/erratic, to which those workings are often reduced.