Clothing, as has been shown in a growing body of anthropological research, not only reflects reality but also works to make it. This article uses the unique lens provided by fashion to focus on the populace in which popular courts stake their legitimacy. Much in the way that laws, processes, and procedures affect people's relationship to law, courthouse attire, too, subtly and perhaps more cunningly contributes to the creation of subjects that interact with and understand the law in specific ways. Specifically, the clothing worn in and required by a popular courthouse helps to make the very community in which that court claims its popularity. Ethnographic examples from fieldwork in a municipal tribunal in Cuba and in the Caribbean Court of Justice in Trinidad and Tobago show how fashion reflects the historical development of each court while it simultaneously works to transform populations into ideal legal subjects.
This article examines the relationship between time and authority in courts of law. Newness, in particular, poses an obstacle to a court's efforts to establish authority because it tethers the institution to a timeline in which the human origins of the court and the political controversies preceding it are easily recalled. Moreover, the abbreviated timeline necessarily limits the body of legal authority (namely, the number of judgments) that could have been produced. This article asks how a court might establish its authority when faced with such problematic newness. Based on extensive ethnographic research at the Caribbean Court of Justice, I demonstrate how the staff and judges at this relatively young tribunal work to create a narrative in which the Court transcends its own troublesome timeline. They do this by attempting to construct a time‐transcendent principle of Caribbeanness and proffering the Court as a manifestation of this higher authority. The Court's narrative of its timelessness, however, is regularly challenged by far more familiar tales of its becoming, suggesting that in this court, as in all courts, the work of building and maintaining authority is ongoing.
This article argues that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), a tribunal serving twelve independent primarily Anglophone Caribbean states, uses a variety of linguistic techniques in its pursuit of a regional future. Created upon a complicated (post)colonial landscape and charged with resolving the nonsovereignty of its member states, which, for the most part, continue to utilize the United Kingdom's Privy Council for their final court of appeal, the CCJ does not view sovereignty as a solution. Instead, as I demonstrate through several examples of the Court's use of, talk about, and abstention from language, the CCJ's judges and employees seek to constitute a yet-to-befully-defined nonsovereign region that carves out a Caribbean people, pointedly rejects ongoing British legacies and logics, refuses to adopt the legal practices associated with sovereignty, and strives to remain untethered to either nation-state or suprastate. [law, language, sovereignty, region, Caribbean] RESUMEN Este artículo argumenta que la Corte de Justicia del Caribe (CCJ), un tribunal al servicio de doce estados independientes primariamente anglófonos del Caribe, usa una variedad de técnicas lingüísticas en la búsqueda de un futuro regional. Creado sobre un paisaje (post)colonial complicado y encargado de resolver la no soberanía de sus estados miembros, la cual, en su mayor parte, continúa utilizando el Consejo Privado del Reino Unido para su corte final de apelaciones, el CCJ no ve la soberanía como una solución. En cambio, como lo demuestro a través de varios ejemplos acerca del uso de la Corte de, hablar sobre, y de la abstención de lenguaje, los jueces y empleados de la CCJ buscan constituir una región no soberana, aún por definir enteramente, que forja un pueblo caribeño, rechaza intencionalmente lógicas y legados británicos, rehúsa adoptar las prácticas legales asociadas con la soberanía, y lucha por permanecer libre de ataduras al Estado nación o al supra-Estado. [ley, lenguaje, soberanía, región, el Caribe]
Drawing from fourteen months of ethnographic research, this article offers an analysis of the Caribbean Court of Justice's (CCJ) efforts to develop Caribbean jurisprudence as an example of how the work of postcolonial courts might be understood not as mimesis, but as productive qualia-tative labor. The semiotic concept of qualia helps to refocus attention on the deliberate "Caribbeanness" that the CCJ endeavors to combine with already well-established "courtly" features, such as deferential courtroom bows and familiar judicial robes. The article argues that by thoughtfully weaving together Caribbean and courtly qualities, the CCJ works to develop Caribbean jurisprudence by making it sensible-that is, both comprehensible and experienceable.
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