Fashioning the Legal Subject: Popular Justice and Courtroom Attire in the Caribbean

Cabatingan, Lee

doi:10.1111/plar.12254

Cited by 7 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Some scholars specifically emphasize how these dynamics are constructed and reinforced through the actual and symbolic orderings of courtrooms. In the context of Caribbean courts, for example, Lee Cabantingan (2018) demonstrates how the choice of courtroom attire can both shed light on the history of law and construct a court's present popular legitimacy. She highlights how both fashion and law have the ability not only to reflect but also to shape and transform societies.…”

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confidence: 99%

“Rotten Row is Rotten to the Core”: The Material and Sensory Politics of Harare's Magistrates’ Courts after 2000

Verheul

2020

PoLAR

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This article analyzes how state power and authority were established and critiqued through the performative, material, and sensory characteristics of Harare's Criminal Magistrates’ Courts in Zimbabwe. Drawing on courtroom observations and interviews conducted with human rights lawyers and their clients between 2010 and 2018, this article shows how Zimbabwe's deteriorating political and economic situation after 2000 caused a decline of the material conditions in court. Lawyers and their clients played on this decline to emphasize how the state failed to display its authority. Simultaneously, these material conditions highlighted the ruling party's (ZANU‐PF) preoccupation with law's coercive rather than legitimating utility. A focus on material attributes, however, does not suffice in examining the ways in which court proceedings impose and challenge the authority of the law and of the state. The sensory dimensions of courtrooms also require attention. Within the courtroom, it was vital for actors to engage the visual, auditory, and—importantly—the olfactory reminders of the horrific conditions in police detention and prison. By doing so, lawyers and their clients reasserted and questioned not only the authority of law but also the control certain state actors exerted on and over the bodies and emotions of Zimbabwean citizens within legal spaces.

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confidence: 99%

“Rotten Row is Rotten to the Core”: The Material and Sensory Politics of Harare's Magistrates’ Courts after 2000

Verheul

2020

PoLAR

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“…This is why the CCJ keeps doing what it is doing and saying what is saying; while a regional future may not be just around the corner, it is a far more hopeful one than a sovereign horizon never meant to arrive. Cabatingan 2016Cabatingan , 2018aCabatingan , and 2018b). 3.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…22In other work, I describe how the CCJ's project of region‐making employs a wide variety of techniques, from reconceptualizing history to monitoring courthouse fashion and bodily comportment (see Cabatingan 2016, 2018a, and 2018b). …”

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confidence: 99%

Law, Language, and a Nonsovereign Caribbean

Cabatingan

2020

American Anthropologist

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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]

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“…Material culture, such as uniforms or office buildings, is central to the reproduction of the state and its legitimacy (Borrelli and Lindberg 2019;Cabatingan 2018;Das 2006;Das and Poole 2004;Hansen and Stepputat 2001;Hull 2012;Messick 1993;Sharma and Gupta 2006), and writing is no different. Bureaucratisation through documents and infra structures removes the state from the citizenry (Scott 1988).…”

Section: Documents As Bureaucratic Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documents and the bureaucratisation of alternative dispute resolution in the United States

Reinke

2020

Journal of Legal Anthropology

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Documents are part of interactive sociocultural worlds in which ethnographers can analyse topics such as power relations, social struggle, violence and secrecy. While they emerge from bureaucratic administration, apparently mundane and stagnant documents represent dynamic processes of decision-making, knowledge production and exclusion. I consider ethnographic research on documents and their production as one that offers significant insights into bureaucratic violence and the tensions between formality and informality in alternative dispute resolution in Virginia and the San Francisco Bay Area. This article discusses working with documents that are simultaneously bound by law and exist extra-legally. While documents are used to gain economic support, strengthen relationships between non-profit and government bodies, and evidence ‘success’, the processes have difficulties. The data demonstrate that bureaucratisation has resulted in cumbersome processes and expensive requirements that mirror the exclusion and power asymmetries of formal law itself.

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Fashioning the Legal Subject: Popular Justice and Courtroom Attire in the Caribbean

Cited by 7 publications

References 21 publications

“Rotten Row is Rotten to the Core”: The Material and Sensory Politics of Harare's Magistrates’ Courts after 2000

“Rotten Row is Rotten to the Core”: The Material and Sensory Politics of Harare's Magistrates’ Courts after 2000

Law, Language, and a Nonsovereign Caribbean

Documents and the bureaucratisation of alternative dispute resolution in the United States

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