Rather than treating law as a body of doctrines, Law at Work: Studies in Legal Ethnomethods adopts an ethnomethodological approach to study meaning and the application of law in various practices and investigates how legal agents interact with non-expert participants to produce legal outcomes.
The introduction, by Baudouin Dupret, Michael Lynch and Tim Berard, discusses the praxiological approach to law and legal work and outlines the contextual use of codes and categories by legal actors.
Section I, ‘Practical Action, Situated Interaction, and the Salience of Law’, consists of three chapters examining the objectivity of law. Baudouin Dupret and Jean-Noel Ferrie's study of a woman's right to divorce in Egypt reveals the sequential nature of law and demonstrates that time is both an objective constraint and an epistemic resource in legal practice. Luisa Zappulli and Karen Latricia Hough illustrate the synthesis of common-sense and professional knowledge in multifaceted professional culture by observing an experienced judge and several trainees. Pedro Heitor Barros Geraldo focuses on how a judge utilizes a cooperative strategy in his interactions with lay participants to integrate the salience of law with empirical knowledge in civil hearings to arrive at appropriate solutions tailored to different contexts.
Section II, ‘Practical Pedagogies in the Performance of Legal Activities’, has two chapters and focuses on explicative transactions. Shiro Kashimura uses conversation analysis to observe public legal consultation conferences and notes that lawyers adopt specific interactional methods to shape the narrative and highlight legally relevant terms and themes. Kenneth Liberman examines exchanges in criminal trials in the Australian Outback involving Aboriginals and points out that courtroom records often distort the endogenous context. As a result, he calls for more attention to be given to the situational nature of the occasion and the differences in languages and cultures.
In section III, ‘Speech, Text and Technology in Testimony’, Renata Galatolo observes that small variations of direct reported speech can function as evidence of opposing versions of facts, despite a strong consistency in the discursive episodes from different witnesses. Michael Lynch shows how a single fragment of testimony can be simplified and de-contextualized through a chain of written documents and testimonies to be finally turned into support for the adversary case. Christian Licoppe and Laurence Dumoulin develop a techno-pragmatic perspective to observe a video conference in a criminal trial and discover the tendency to de-formalize when difficulty occurs.
Section IV, ‘Deviance, Membership Categories and Legalities’, includes three studies. Tim Berard investigates how specific labels are objectified through legal work and proposes that labeling and accounting practices are the foundation for the praxiological understanding of law. Sally Hester and Stephen Hester explore educational context and suggest that membership categorization and descriptions of deviance often invite specific social actions. Lena Jayyusi identifies nuances of vocabulary and phrasing in contested accounts of civilian deaths during the Gaza War and outlines the danger of carefully crafted, defensively designed public statements.
With its unique ethnomethodological perspective and extensive legal contexts, this volume will prove a valuable source for researchers interested in linguistics and the law.
