Abstract:The shift towards dispute resolution taking place outside traditional legal arenas is fundamentally changing the relationship between space and law, presenting legal geography with pressing new research opportunities. This paper explores how the emerging geographies of publicness, materiality, access to justice and communication shed light on the consequences of alternative and online dispute resolution. Crucially, these consequences raise urgent interdisciplinary questions for geography and law. We set out th… Show more
“…Courtwatching sets the concepts of visibility, publicness, witnessing, and embodiment that ethnographers sometimes discuss within the context of ongoing activist struggles over rights and due processes, bestowing urgency and relevance onto questions about the roles and limitations of these concepts in practice, as well as contributing to scholarly understanding of them. What is more, as justice systems become increasingly privatised and digitised (see Hynes et al., 2020 ), courtwatching organisations offer a distinctive perspective on debates around open justice, democracy, and state accountability.…”
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.
“…Courtwatching sets the concepts of visibility, publicness, witnessing, and embodiment that ethnographers sometimes discuss within the context of ongoing activist struggles over rights and due processes, bestowing urgency and relevance onto questions about the roles and limitations of these concepts in practice, as well as contributing to scholarly understanding of them. What is more, as justice systems become increasingly privatised and digitised (see Hynes et al., 2020 ), courtwatching organisations offer a distinctive perspective on debates around open justice, democracy, and state accountability.…”
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.
“…In analyses of courts, hearings and trials, legal geographers have recognised that the sites at which legal hearings take place have a material effect upon the law via the 'nature of trial spaces, court architecture and the arrangement of courtrooms' (Jeffrey, 2019, p.565). Material perspectives on trials and hearings also extend to the influence of new technologies that are used in court rooms, which is often highly spatial (Hynes, Gill, & Tomlinson, 2020), as well as 'the performance and comportment of trial participants' (Jeffrey, 2019, p.566).…”
“…There is a bit of an echo on the microphones; the line is not clear. (Fieldnotes, 2018, Paris) The reorganisation that video-linking entails results in a splitting of the court space, and changes the atmosphere, speech, and behaviour of parties (Hynes et al, 2020). It also exposes the ambiguity of the presence/absence of participants.…”
Section: Haunted Hearingsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Appellants’ attendance is generally not mandatory 21 but when they do not attend they miss the opportunity to provide clarification on points of confusion or contestation. Lawyers in Greece, where appeals are on paper and where the proportion rejected exceeded 90% in 2018, were adamant that the lack of an oral in‐person hearing disadvantages appellants (see also Hynes et al., 2020). I believe it would be so important for the judges to see the applicants.…”
There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully-fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non-attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law's omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practised. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.
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