Fantastic News! #MSCActions Fellows
This morning I received word that the Marie Curie grant proposal I have been working on over the summer has been accepted! This means that the coming three years*, I will be working at the Catholic University of Leuven, more specifically a the Life Sciences and Society Lab, expertly headed by Prof. I. van Hoyweghen. … Continue reading →
On Doing What’s Right: Lessons from Judicial Practice
The decisions judges have to make on a day-to-day basis are difficult: after all, they affect the defendant’s life deeply. In other words, they have to do the right thing. But what is ‘right’ to do in one context isn’t necessarily what’s right in another setting. How can we think about these evaluations and judgments, … Continue reading →
Feeling Like a File-Worker: On Affects, Bureaucratic Investments, and Care
How do judges feel their way through their case load? What is the role of the emotions and of affects in bureaucratic practices anyway? And how can we develop the tools to do justice to the affective texture of file-work? It’s been in the making for a while now, but I am glad to be … Continue reading →
The Invisibility of Case Files: On Documentary Doubling
Sociologies of judicial decision-making practices often concentrate on verbal interactions in Court. Dramatizing the encounter between impersonal, abstract ‘Law’ and the individual defendant, these settings have attracted significant sociological attention and wonder. But what about the pretrial work that takes place backstage? And what about the legal case file? Case files have not received a … Continue reading →
How Race Haunts Criminal Justice: In/Visible Histories, Contemporary Concerns
The relationship between criminal justice and race is fraught. The revival of calls for prison abolition emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement raise a set of difficult questions scholars of law and society will need to attend to. One of these questions is: How can we understand this fraught relationship between law and race? … Continue reading →
Law, Time – and Folded Objects
Contemporary approaches in science and technology studies are increasingly pointing to the role of time and temporality in shaping scientific knowledge production. Can we draw on this same sensibility to make sense of legal practices of case-making? Within legal practices, time is of the essence. Procedure introduces the necessity to take stock of precise dates … Continue reading →
Seeing like a Judge: Beyond Statistical Understandings of Judicial Practice
Sentencing disparities research is an important source of insight in the reproduction of inequalities in the criminal justice system. However, they offer a highly limited understanding of what it is like to see the world like a judge. What do statistics do? A strange question perhaps, but one that is at the heart of Chapter … Continue reading →
Authentic apologies – or feeling bad you got caught?
For judges, the question whether a defendant demonstrates authentic remorse is of paramount importance. But how do they interpret and weigh these demonstrations of remorse? Remorse – a crucial emotion in Western understandings our obligations to others – is an essential ingredient of sentencing practices. Authentic remorse, to judges, is more than just an apology. … Continue reading →
Decentering the Judge: On Clerks and Case Files
One of the most fascinating dimensions of researching legal practices – to me – is the way a close look at backstage proceedings reorients one’s attention to the social and material distribution of ‘judging’. The field of socio-legal studies, because of its close association with legal scholarship, tends to think of judging as an activity … Continue reading →
The Law Multiple – Coming Soon
The Law Multiple – my monograph on social scientific and legal ways of case-making – is scheduled to be published by Cambridge University press in November 2020 in its Cambridge Studies in Law and Society series. (EDIT Jan. 18 2021: The publication seems to have been pushed back to February 2021!) Having spent the majority … Continue reading →
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