The lawyers as guardians of the case file: on human-material encounters in immigration law in Russia

ABSTRACT This paper looks at the human rights and immigration lawyers in Russia inspired by the approach that embraces both human and non-human objects in shaping the everyday experiences of the law. Drawing on five months ethnographic fieldwork in Russian legal aid NGOs that represent asylum seekers and interviews with the immigration lawyers who worked there, this paper casts more light on the file-based model of delivering justice, whereby refugees and their stories cannot be constructed differently than through the materiality of the case file. This paper argues that the specific relationship between the immigration lawyers and their clients’ case files has not developed in a vacuum, but can be traced back to the traditions of the legal profession in Russia. It is also illustrative of three specific traits of the broader Russian legal culture: legal formalism, the inconsistency of the legal process and the hyperbolic reality-mediating function attached to documentary evidence.