Time and Transcendence: Narrating Higher Authority at the Caribbean Court of Justice

Abstract

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.

Law, Language, and a Nonsovereign Caribbean

“…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.…”

“…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). …”

Caribbean Community (CARICOM) — Culture

“…The fact that the other Member States continue to appeal their cases to the Privy Council, means that Privy Council precedent still reigns there. 69 It is a rather sad and frustrating event, especially when one takes into account that most Member States had signed the Agreement that established the Court, which Agreement states: "All signatories committed to the accession to the Court in its appellate jurisdiction, convinced of the 'determinative role of the Court in the further development of Caribbean jurisprudence' and the 'deepening of the regional integration process'". 70 Holding that the acceptance of that specific jurisdiction of the Court would mean a partial transfer of their national sovereignty to the Court 71 is even more paradoxical, when one knows that appealing to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is a huge transfer of their national sovereignty, a survival of colonialism.…”

Caribbeanist Anthropology and Minerva's Owl: Lessons Forgotten, Lessons Learned

“…But there certainly are emergent transitions to be studied in the region, and here I would point toward Vanessa Agard-Jones's (2013) work on environmental toxicity in Martinique, Rivke Jaffe's (2016) work on urban environmental justice in Jamaica and Curaçao, Kiran Jayaram's (2018) work on the social and cultural consequences of export mango production in Haiti, Ryan Jobson's (2021) ethnographies of petrochemical extraction in Trinidad, Olivia Gomes da Cunha's (2018Cunha's ( , 2021 work on the afterlife of American bauxite mining in a Suriname maroon village, or the questions of national sovereignty-or the lack thereof-explored by my former students: 11 Greg Beckett (2019), Yarimar Bonilla (2015Bonilla ( , 2020, Lee Cabatingan (2016Cabatingan ( , 2018Cabatingan ( , 2020, Jeffrey Kahn (2019), and Chelsey Kivland (2020) in the context of Haiti's perennial crisis, Guadeloupe's syndicalist movement, the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice, the evolution of the U.S.-Haitian water border, or grass roots organizing in Port-au-Prince, respectively (see Thomas, this issue). Brent Crosson's (2020) updating of the study of Afro-Caribbean religious traditions in light of post-Asadian discussions of secularism belong in that picture, as does Stuart Strange's (2018) explorations of Ndyuka "metaphysics of history" and affliction, or Anthony Medina's (2020) dissertation on Cuban "pandillas"-i.e., criminalized Black male associations (which Medina carefully disentangles from both the image of U.S. "gangs" and Central American "maras")-that can be profitably read together with Jovan Lewis's (2020) ethnography of Jamaican online scammers.…”