Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-n9wrp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T01:24:39.688Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The “Paper Case”: Evidence and Narrative of a Terrorism Trial in Delhi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Mayur Suresh Open the ORCID record for Mayur Suresh [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Through an ethnography of a terrorism trial that followed bomb-blasts in Delhi in 2008, this article seeks to understand the centrality of files and documentary practices to the production of legal truth. By following key documents regarding the case against one man I call Fahad, I argue that the truth produced in a trial crucially depends a chain of seemingly insignificant certificatory practices-the signatures, countersignatures, stamps, and seals that appear on documents. What emerges in the account I provide is that juridical truth is less a matter of finding ‘what really happened,’ and more about the competition between narratives that depend on the certificatory correctness of humble sheets of paper.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 173 - 201
Copyright
© 2018 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors—especially Susan Sterett—for their helpful feedback on drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Chitralekha Manohar, Danielle McClellan, Jinee Lokaneeta, Laura Lammasniemi, Piyel Haldar, Sruti Chaganti, and Sneha Krishnan for their comments on drafts of this paper. Thanks to Chinmay Kanojia and Praavita Kashyap for their help in transliterating some of the documents. An earlier version of this paper was presented as a part of panel titled “Evidence in Question: Anthropological authority and legal judgment” at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference in Milan, 2014. I would like to thank Julia Eckert and Gerhard Anders for inviting me to the panel and for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

References

Barrera, Leticia (2008) “Files Circulation and the Forms of Legal Experts: Agency and Personhood in the Argentine Supreme Court,” 1 Journal of Legal Anthropology 3–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy (1843) The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, vol. 6. Edinburgh: William Tait. 1838–43. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1923#Bentham_0872-06_239 (accessed 26 July 2016).Google Scholar
Berti, Daniela (2015) “Technicalities of Doubting: Temple Consultations and Criminal Trials in India,” in Daniela, Berti, Good, Anthony, & Tarabout, Gilles, eds., Of Doubt and Proof: Ritual and Legal Practices of Judgment. Farnham: Ashgate. 19–38.Google Scholar
Constable, Marianne (2014) Our Word is our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Das, Veena (2004) “The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility,” in Das, V. & Poole, D., eds., Anthropology at the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. 225–52.Google Scholar
Dery, David (1998) “‘Papereality’ and Learning in Bureaucratic Organisations,” 29 Administration & Society 677–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engelke, Matthew (2009) “The Objects of Evidence,” in Engelke, Matthew, ed., The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 1–20.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia and Silbey, Susan (1998) The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harper, Richard (2000) “The Social Organisation of the IMF's Mission Work: an Example of International Auditing,” in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hastrup, Kirsten (2004) “Getting it right: Knowledge and Evidence in Anthropology,” 4 Anthropological Theory 455–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, Jacqueline (2002) “Hierarchy, Bureaucracy and Ideology in French Criminal Justice: Some Empirical Observations,” 29 Journal of Law and Society 227–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, Matthew (2003) “The file: Agency, Authority and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy,” 23 Language and Communication 287–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, Matthew (2012) Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kafka, Ben (2012) The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. New York: Zone Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno (1999) “Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest,” in Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 24–79.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno (2010) The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat. Translated by Brilman, Marina & Pottage, Alain. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth (2007) The Language of Law School: Learning to Think Like a Lawyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moir, Martin (1996) “Kaghazi Raj: Notes on the documentary basis of Company rule 1773–1858,” Indo-British Review: A Journal of History (Feb) 185–93.Google Scholar
Mou, Yu (2017) “The Constructed Truth: The Making of Police Dossiers in China,” 26 Social and Legal Studies 69–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pottage, Alain (2012) “The materiality of what?” 39 Journal of Law and Society 167–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Power, Michael (1997) The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Raman, Bhavani (2012) Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogers, Nicole (2008) “Terrorist v. Sovereign: Legal Performances in a State of Exception,” 12 Law Text Culture 159–84.Google Scholar
Scheffer, Thomas (2004) “Materialities of Legal Proceedings,” 17 International Journal of Semiotics of Law 356–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheffer, Thomas (2007) “File Work, Legal Care and Professional Habitus—An Ethnography of Different Styles of Advocacy,” 14 International Journal of the Legal Profession 57–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheffer, Thomas (2010) Adversarial Case-Making: An Ethnography of English Crown Court Procedure. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Wendie Ellen (2015) Engines of Truth: Producing Veracity in the Victorian Courtroom. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Singh, Ujjwal Kumar (2006) “The Silent Erosion: Anti-Terror Laws and Shifting Contours of Jurisprudence in India,” 53 Diogenes 116–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singh, Ujjwal Kumar (2007) The State, Democracy and Anti-terror Laws in India. New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar
Singha, Radhika (1998) A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Richard Saumarez (1985) “Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law,” 19 Contributions to Indian Sociology 153–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephen, James Fitzjames (1872) The Indian Evidence Act: With an Introduction on the Principles of Judicial Evidence. London: Macmillan & Co.Google Scholar
Tarlo, Emma (2003) Unsettling memories: Narratives of India's Emergency. New Delhi: Permanent Black.Google Scholar
Twining, William (2006) Rethinking Evidence: Exploratory Essays, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Oorschot, Irene & Schinkel, Willem (2015) “The Legal Case File as a Border Object: On Self-Reference and Other-Reference in Criminal Law,” 42 Journal of Law and Society 499–527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vismann, Cornelia (2008) in Winthrop-Young, Goeffrey, ed., Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
White, James Boyd (1985) Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Whyte, Zachary (2015) “In Doubt: Documents as Fetishes in the Danish Asylum System,” in Berti, Daniela, Good, Anthony, & Tarabout, Gilles, eds., Of doubt and Proof: Ritual and Legal Practices of Judgment. Farnham: Ashgate. 141–62.Google Scholar