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Contextualizing the Court: Comments on the Cultural Study of Litigation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Barbara Yngvesson
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Abstract

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This comment argues that to understand the role of trial courts in maintaining a particular order of differences in society, attention must be directed beyond official legal arenas and official rules to the actions of ordinary citizens and of “marginal” legal officials who make law and shape the court through practices that are excluded from official accounts. This move provides an account of the meaning of courts, of cases, and of law that is relational, and that attends to the agency of everyday people in producing and resisting forms of domination.

Type
Part III: New Theory for Longitudinal Trial Court Research
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 24 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Longitudinal Studies of Trial Courts , 1990 , pp. 467 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Frank Munger's help in editing the manuscript is also very much appreciated.

References

1 The following discussion draws both on previously published material dealing with citizen-clerk interaction (Yngvesson, 1988) and on unpublished material relating to hearings in which the police were the complainants.

2 See Santos (1977: 68), Yngvesson and Mather (1983: 66), and Bourdieu (1987: 224) on the ways specific kinds of arena constrain the interpretation given to events.

3 Of 294 complaints brought by citizens during a seven-month period in 1982, only 33 percent (94) were issued.

4 Of 324 complaints brought to the clerk by police during the same seven-month period in 1982, 82 percent (245) were issued.

5 Analysis of interview and observational material from 110 citizen complaints indicated that in 81 of them there had been at least 1 (and in some cases up to 10) calls to the police before the complaint was brought to the clerk.

6 This exchange took place at the Conference on Longitudinal Research on Trial Courts held August 24–27, 1989, SUNY Buffalo. See Special Issue Editor's introduction. [—Ed.]

7 Black (1971) argues that the complainant plays a key role in how problems are defined by the police.

8 See Giddens's (1979: 69) discussion of the “duality of structure” in which structure is both a medium and an outcome of practice.

9 Fifteen complaints were involved in this extended case.