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Making sense of the problems which illiterate people face in gaining access to justice puts the foundations of both the ethnography of law and the modern justice system itself into question. The essay explores this thesis with reference to the case of an elderly dairy farmer whose arrest for the mercy killing of his ailing brother attracted intense local and national attention. Documents from the trial which deal with the construction and use of evidence, confession, and testimony, along with schematic representations of the personal, community, and media responses to the case as depicted in the award-winning documentary Brother's Keeper (1992), render visible the textual conventions of a litigious society along with its non-literate and even ritual cultural context. The most troubling issue raised by the case involves a crisis in the bureaucratic organization and expert professionalization of modern litigation when it attempts to address the rights and competencies of relatively illiterate people who appear unable to articulate the values and beliefs of any cultural community at all.

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Litigating Illiteracy: The Media, the Law, and The People of the State of New York v. Adelbert Ward *

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Litigating Illiteracy: The Media, the Law, and The People of the State of New York v. Adelbert Ward*

Litigating Illiteracy: The Media, the Law, and The People of the State of New York v. Adelbert Ward *