This article presents an understanding of transparency that draws on the instrumentality and performativity of a series of public encounters between the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice and subjects affected by river pollution. An ethnographic examination of those encounters illustrates how judicial adjudication articulates with a larger discourse of change and transparency that mushroomed after the 2001–2002 economic crisis giving the Court a public face. This crisis had a negative impact on the credibility of political and legal institutions. A focus on the performative character of public hearings implies an appreciation of transparency that is more comprehensive than the one enabled by visibility. As I argue in this article, this is because public hearings entail displays of the self that unfold through a complex sensorial experience that has effects on audiences. In the context of the Argentine Supreme Court's practices that this article examines, such audiences may extend far beyond the courtroom. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how transparency can be perceived as the performance of social positions that provide means and ends for a multitude of intended and unintended actors.

No abstract

This article addresses the question of judicial authority by examining the mundane practices of legal knowledge‐making that unfold within the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice. Building on a larger ethnographic study of the court in the aftermath of the country's 2001–2002 crisis, this article focuses on the particular forms and documentary practices Supreme Court justices use to review a few select cases and then discard the majority without explanation. Analyzing these practices sheds light on the tensions that exist among different imaginaries of judicial adjudication and the court's role in the native legal field. In this context, this article argues that exclusion operates not only as a tool of docket management and control but also as a way to shape judicial authority and legitimacy in contemporary Argentina.

Correo electrónico: leticiabarrera@conicet.gov.ar Fecha de recepción: marzo 2011 Fecha de aceptación: julio 2011Resumen Los expedientes, notas, y documentos en general, son vistos como instrumentos rutinarios de la práctica burocráti-ca, los medios para alcanzar un fin: la decisión judicial. Por tanto, el análisis tiende a centrarse en los 'resultados' de los actos institucionales, pero no en el proceso de institucionalización que implican los expedientes. Por esta razón, el derecho es aprehendido por sus fines y el análisis jurídico se mantiene dentro de los límites epistemológicos de los mismos. En este ensayo, me propongo dirigir la atención a los expedientes como objetos de análisis en sus propios términos. Para hacerlo, elaboro de manera etnográfica sobre mi expediente personal tal como se desarrolló en mi trabajo de campo en la Corte Suprema de Argentina de agosto de 2005 a febrero de 2007. Al examinar el expediente como un artefacto de conocimiento, busco traer a la superficie aspectos del proceso de creación del derecho que se mantienen como un punto ciego de los estudios socio-legales.Palabras clave: expedientes, burocracia, derecho, etnografía, instrumentos. Abstract Files, memoranda, and paperwork in general, are seen as routine instruments of bureaucratic practice, the means for achieving an end: the legal decision. Consequently, the analysis tends to focus on the 'results' of institutional acts but not on the process of institutionalization that files entail. Therefore law is apprehended by its ends and the legal analysis is kept within the epistemological boundaries of the same ends. In this essay, I propose to bring attention to legal files as analytical objects in their own terms. To do so, I elaborate, in the ethnographic mode, on my personal file as it unfolded in my fieldwork in the Argentine Supreme Court from August 2005 to February 2007. In looking at the file as an artifact of knowledge, I seek to bring to the surface aspects of lawmaking that remain a blind spot of socio-legal studies.

This article presents an image of the judicial space that seeks to challenge ubiquitous representations and scholarly metaphors of legal settings that recreate judicial practice as constrained within a delimited site. The article draws on ethnographic work conducted at the Argentine Supreme Court between August 2005 and March 2007, and focuses on the direct observation of the Argentine Supreme Court’s daily dynamic articulated by concrete senses of mobility and access. Additionally, it builds upon the aesthetics of restoration, prompted by the scene of the restoration of the Court’s building, to suggest the tensions that arise out of the efforts to reconstruct the judicial order in post 2001–2-crisis Argentina, constantly disrupted by the institution’s own routine.