Theorizing Everyday Justice

Abstract

ly conceived issues can seemingly be resolved in concreteness and the virtues of simple, unreflected upon existence. Santiago Amietta, in Chapter 7, writing on the lay participants in Argentina’s criminal trials, also draws on Marcus’s and Valverde’s insights. Amietta problematizes the boundaries between everyday justice and its institutional counterparts as justice operates in legal spaces. A discourse of the everyday arises from a ‘negative constitution’ (Valverde 2003), or construction, of how ordinary citizens serve as jurors and have a measure of juridical power vested in them within the law’s own working. These people, conceived as legal subjects or arbiters par excellence, are entirely separated from their ordinary lives while at the courthouse. Amietta, however, neither poses an opposition amongst the everyday and institutions’ legal spaces, times, or persons, nor resorts to the binary of formal–informal ‘as epitomic of ontologically discrete realms’. Instead, he suggests a juxtaposition of the formal and the informal within judicial proceedings as a ‘heuristic device’, turning these very boundaries into part of what is studied ethnographically. Amietta’s main conceptual claim is that boundaries between the everyday and formally legal may be appropriately conceived as ‘power-laden attempts at governing the very formal–informal, legal– extra-legal divide in discrete contexts’. His ethnographic vignettes show that jurors – positioned by authorized legal discourse as bearers of the everyday – do not always behave as expected and as their casting as ‘ordinary persons’ might suppose. Uncertain of the nuances of legal processes, jurors make considerable efforts to observe formalities during proceedings. When they make a mistake, however, it is sometimes not acknowledged as authenticating or ‘ordinary’ but called out as transgressive of legal processes. Amietta argues that this dynamic has related effects: it re-inscribes an othering, even as it serves jurors’ selfidentification with the everyday and facilitates the portrayal of legal professionals as ‘guardians of the law’. These accounts underline – and make it worth re-emphasizing – the salience of bringing an ethnographic gaze to the enactments of justice in generating penetrating accounts of the everyday life of justice. Ethnography has always studied the contingent practices of everyday life as expressed in interactions, articulations, and transformations; this includes enabling to reveal multiple ‘time/space-specific structuration THEORIZING EVERYDAY JUSTICE