The Legal Case File as Border Object: On Self‐reference and Other‐reference in Criminal Law

Abstract

What do case files do? With help of an ethnographic study on the care, maintenance, and use of legal case files in a Dutch, inquisitorial context, we work through Latour's and Luhmann's conceptualizations of law. We understand these case files as enacting and performing both self‐reference and other‐reference. We coin the term border object to denote the way the legal case file becomes the nexus between two worlds it itself performatively produces: the world of ‘law itself’ on the one hand, and the ‘world out there’ on the other. As such, our discussion offers clues for a partial reconciliation of Latour's and Luhmann's conceptualizations of law: while Luhmann's insistence on other‐referential operations assist in showing how law forges an ‘epistemic relationship’ with the realities it seeks to judge, Latour's concentration on the materialities of epistemic practices assists in situating these other‐referential and self‐referential operations.

Black-boxing the Evidence: Planning Regulation and Major Renewable Energy Infrastructure Projects in England and Wales

“…In related work, Hunt and Shackley (1999) coin the term 'fiducial science' to describe knowledge-claims produced as a service to others (such as regulators), where there is an emphasis on trust in the knowledge and on creating closure in uncertain and contested arenas. The contested mix of knowledge-claims arising from uncertainty has to be reduced so that it can provide the basis for the regulatory decision; in the context of judicial decision-making, van Oorschot and Schinkel (2015) refer to this as rendering the world 'judgement-compatible' .…”

“…So, these knowledge-claims undergo a transformation, reduced to sets of classifications about the scale of significance of the impacts. This is part of the rendering of the world 'judgement-compatible ' (van Oorschot & Schinkel, 2015), as in most cases only very significant impacts will outweigh the presumed need for the projects. This transformation of complex knowledge-claims into black-boxed categories of significance is necessary to enable the move from the context in which modelling is undertaken and debated, to the deliberations of the NSIPs process over significance, and then to decision-making within a central government department.…”

“…The paper then looks as the ways that evidence is framed and considers how disputes over evidence arise and are then closed down. Such 'closing down' is necessary to make the world 'judgement-compatible ' (van Oorschot & Schinkel, 2015) for the regulators. The final conclusion pulls together the analysis and considers the implications for evidence-based planning and for the treatment of knowledge-claims put forward by local actors.…”

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

“…In contrast to his work on science, Latour's seminal ethnography of France's Conseil d'Etat (Latour 2010) gives little space to understand how the law produces facts (Pottage 2012;Van Oorschot and Schinkel 2015). As he tracks the file's movement in the court's bureaucracy, Latour's work on law is concerned with the "processes of enunciation" (Pottage 2012) and the movement between different types of writing (Latour, 2010: 86).…”

“…1 The Indian legal system is not unique in its reliance upon files, and the importance of files to judicial processes has been studied in several different jurisdictions (Barrera 2008;Hodgson 2002;Latour 2010;Mou 2017;Scheffer 2004Scheffer , 2007Scheffer , 2010Van Oorschot and Schinkel 2015;Whyte 2015).…”