The Law Multiple
Judgment and Knowledge in Practice

Where, when, and how is the law practiced? An investigation of how truths are made in the legal system.

Irene van Oorschot (Author)

9781108494809, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 March 2021

250 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 1.5 cm, 0.48 kg

'… an interesting and well-written account … a nuanced discussion of how judges and other court participants assemble legal cases.' Michael Lynch, Journal of Law and Society

In the field of socio-legal studies or law and society scholarship, it is rare to find empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated understandings of actual legal practice. This book, in contrast, connects the conceptual and the empirical, the abstract and the concrete, and in doing so shows the law to be an irreducibly social, material and temporal practice. Drawing on cutting-edge work in the social study of knowledge, it grapples with conceptual and methodological questions central to the field: how and where judgment empirically takes place; how and where facts are made; and how researchers might study these local and concrete ways of judging and knowing. Drawing on an ethnographic study of how narratives and documents, particularly case files, operate within legal practices, this book's unique and innovative approach consists of rearticulating the traditional boundaries separating judgment from knowledge, urging us to rethink the way truths are made within law.

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Note on the Text
1. Troubling Encounters
2. Abstractionism, Revisited
3. Dealing with Difference: Doing Criminal Law and Social Order
4. Situating Remorse
5. Visualizing Cases
6. Folding Times, Making Truths
7. Productive Fictions for the Study of the Law: From Hyper-Explanation to Hyper-Object.

Subject Areas: Legal profession: general [LAT], Law & society [LAQ], Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], Sociology [JHB]