Courtwatching: Visibility, publicness, witnessing, and embodiment in legal activism

Abstract

The paper sets out what courtwatching is and gives some examples from various countries. It argues that a closer engagement with courtwatching in legal geography will yield insights into the issues of visibility, publicness, witnessing, and embodiment that surround court observations.

To fail an asylum seeker: Time, space and legal events

“…Observers are uncommon at appeal hearings in the UK (with the exception of law students), however, and judges, legal representatives, interpreters, ushers and security staff may all have been on their ‘best behaviour’ as a result of our presence. Indeed, ‘courtwatching’ has been likened to a form of inverse surveillance used in order to reduce incidents of bias or discrimination by activist groups in various settings (Gill et al, 2014; Gill and Hynes, 2021 ) and, although we remained as inconspicuous as possible, our constant note-taking may have positively altered peoples’ behaviours and actions in the courtroom (Faria et al, 2019). It is also possible, however, that government representatives may have wished to ‘put on a show’ for those observing, performing their roles with more vigour as a result.…”

Practising legal geography

“…In widening the methodological toolkit of legal geographers, and in particular drawing on the significance of advocacy practices such as accompaniment and institutional advocacy, Cuomo illustrates how activist strategy and methodological practice can interplay to reveal – while also seeking to confront – law’s spatial qualities. This interface between intellectual practice and activist strategy is further developed in the second paper of the section by Nick Gill and Jo Hynes (2021), in their exploration of courtwatching. This seemingly simple activity of observing the unfolding of trials has been utilised by activists and civil society groups to scrutinise legal processes and challenge miscarriages of justice.…”

Investigating trial spaces: Thinking through legal spatiality beyond the court

“…This has been a productive turn, as criminologists, anthropologists and geographers have sought to move beyond an imagination of law operating ‘within’ particular contexts, to focus instead on the co‐constitution of what are understood as ‘law’ and ‘society’ through the operation of regimes of power and knowledge (Bennett & Layard, 2015; Braverman, 2014; Delaney, 2015; Moran et al, 2018). But even within this work, there has been a privileging of understanding law through the eyes of law makers or public observers (see Gill & Hynes, 2021; Jeffrey, 2020a; Latour, 2010) and rather less emphasis has been placed on the attitudes and perspectives of those who have been the focus of criminal justice procedures: those who are found guilty of crime and sentenced to custodial punishment (with exceptions: see, for example, Hall, 2016).…”

“…Drawing on qualitative data drawn from individuals sentenced through the England and Wales court system, this paper is bringing into conversation scholarship from criminology (Crewe et al, 2022; Hall, 2016; Schinkel, 2014; Sexton, 2015), socio‐legal studies (Mulcahy, 2010), and legal (Gill & Hynes, 2021; Jeffrey, 2020a) and carceral (Fraser & Schliehe, 2021; Moran, 2015; Pallot, 2015; Turner, 2016) geography in order to explore how court spaces work on people who are on trial, how individual experiences in these spaces shape a wider experience of justice, and how we can understand legal (and court) geographies in the context of a lived experience of broader justice journeys (including prison life, life beyond prison, entering society after experiences with the justice system). Carceral geographic work, while initially focusing on the more ‘traditional’ institutional spaces (Dirsuweit, 1999; Moran, 2012), has since branched out to include other institutions that show carceral traits (Disney, 2015; Repo, 2019; Schliehe, 2014) and indeed tracing carceral elements into urban areas (Fraser & Schliehe, 2021) or exploring effects of surveillance into society at large (Gacek, 2022) and researching the spatiality of penality (Pallot, 2015).…”