What next for courtroom special measures? Embodying legal geographies through “appreciative‐assemblage” methodology

Abstract

Courtrooms globally are being reshaped by (1) (legal) special measures, and (2) increasing voluntary sector involvement. We examine multisectoral efforts to change conditions under which vulnerable people give evidence in Scotland. Vulnerable complainers (in Scotland)/complainants and witnesses are now often shielded by screens and accompanied by volunteer witness supporters when testifying. These developments have important (geo)political implications. However, little scholarship examines the spatiality, materiality, and discursivity of the special measures themselves and/or the relationships between special measures, courts, and the voluntary sector. Addressing this gap, we fuse assemblage methodologies and appreciative inquiry, providing a novel methodological hybrid to underpin forthcoming research examining what constitutes these measures and their relationships with the court voluntary sector. Our “playful experimentation” increases the political momentum of assemblages and adds spatial, material, and discursive perspectives to narrative‐focused appreciative inquiry, to facilitate best evidence and organisational development. Our methodological hybrid increases interdisciplinary possibilities: for embodied legal geography, seeing law as enacted through the spatial, material, and discursive body of a volunteer; and for criminal justice voluntary sector studies, creating a more materially and spatially aware public criminology. This is relevant across interest groups, including those supporting (vulnerable) populations involved in criminal justice; evaluating court reforms; and doing research involving the representational, emotional, and affective body.

Progressive and critical legal geography scholarship

“…Litigation has been a continued focus for legal geography scholarship, and the papers by both Legg and Prior and Carr show that here. Articulating how litigation variously represents and frames more-than-human bodies, property and the state extends our thinking about the ways in which law-people-place collide and intertwine (see also Faria et al, 2020;Traynor & Tomczak, 2021).…”

Loitering with (research) intent: Remote ethnographies in the immigration tribunal

“…Embodied legal geographies have received significant attention in recent years (Jeffrey, 2020a;Traynor & Tomczak, 2021), countering, as Jeffrey (2020aJeffrey ( , p. 1006 suggests, 'images of law as an abstract, disembodied and immutable enactment of authority'. This challenging of dominant discourses and images of law by foregrounding the site of the body is a valuable turn and an area to which legal geographers are well positioned to contribute.…”

Practising legal geography

“…In the context of increasing use of digital technology to facilitate judicial processes across the world, the paper concludes with a timely reflection on the significance of physical presence to the unfolding of law. This question of physical presence and the practice of law is picked up in the third paper in the section by Catherine Traynor and Philippa Tomczak (2021). Their work focuses on the changing conditions under which vulnerable people give evidence in Scotland, focusing in particular on the changing role of voluntary organisations and alterations to the physical infrastructures of law.…”