Description
Book SynopsisUnderstanding legal rules not as determinants of behavior but as points of reference for conduct, this volume considers the ways in which rules are invoked, referred to, interpreted, put forward or blurred. It also asks how both legal practitioners and lay participants conceive of and participate in the construction of facts and rules, and thus, through decisions, defenses, pleas, files, evidence, interviews and documents, actively participate in law's life. With attention to the formulation of notions such as person, evidence, intention, cause and responsibility in the course of legal practices, Legal Rules in Practice provides the outlines of a praxiological anthropology of law an anthropology that focuses on words, concepts and reasoning as actively used to solve conflicts with the help of legal rules. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of law with interests in ethnomethodology, rule-based conduct and practical reasoning.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: legal rules in practice: an exploration into law’s life 1. Ruleness Part 1 : Ruleness and its relativity 2. No rule for the application of rules 3. The structure of the legal system and the emergence of the state 4. Equality, hierarchy, and the place of rules 5. Laws and proverbs: the making and unmaking of moral rules in historic Tibet Part 2: Materiality, artefactuality and idiosyncrasy of legal practices 6. Reading case files: the material organization of cases and the work of judges 7. Verbatim records and the testing ceremony: on the production of decidability in German asylum hearings 8. Craft skills and legal rules: how Australian magistrates make bail decisions 9. Vernacular visions of viral videos: Speaking for evidence that speaks for itself Part 3: Meaning and emotions in legal interpretation 10. Time to agree? rules, agreements and consent judgements in a Belgian family court 11. Law, emotions and categorizations: lightning a judicial blind spot: on the role of emotions inside the magistrate’s decision making 12. Playing by the rules: the search for legal grounds in homosexuality cases - Indonesia, Lebanon, Egypt, Senegal
