Book Review: La Corte Suprema en escena: una etnografía del mundo judicial [The Supreme Court on stage: An ethnographic study of the judicial world
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663914523201b |
| Author | Damian A Gonzalez-Salzberg |
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Reece H (2009b) Feminist anti-violence discourse as regulation. In: Day Sclater S, Ebtehaj F,
Jackson E and Richards M (eds) Regulating Autonomy: Sex, Reproduction and Family. Oxford,
UK: Hart Publishing, pp. 37–51.
LETICIA BARRERA, La Corte Suprema en escena: una etnografı
´
a del mundo judicial [The Supreme
Court on stage: An ethnographic study of the judicial world]. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores,
2012, pp. 174, ISBN 9789876292337 (pbk).
In Spanish, there is a saying that affirms that what is good, if brief, is twice as good. The
saying perfectly applies to this book by Leticia Barrera. Leticia’s book is a short but
comprehensive ethnographic study of the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice. More pre-
cisely, it is a study of the materiality of the judicial bureaucracy in the making of the
judicial rulings of the Supreme Court. It is certainly the first anthropological study of the
work of the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice, and it is fair to say that the originality of
the subject goes hand by hand with the quality of the research.
Even though the book is in Spanish, it is based on the research conducted during the
author’s PhD studies at Cornell University in the United States. Therefore, her thesis,
Performing the Court: Forms and practices of legal knowledge-making in Argentina,
could be read in English in the library of Cornell University, and it will also become
available in electronic format in May 2014 (http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/han-
dle/1813/12828).
In short, Leticia has chosen the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice as her focus of
study, resorting to the analysis of the judicial bureaucracy as an ethnographic field. The
main aim of Leticia’s book is to offer an alternative and in-depth understanding of the
field of law, through the analysis of the judicial practice of the Supreme Court. In par-
ticular, this work illustrates how a judicial decision, a clear manifestation of law, is cre-
ated through the material behaviour of different individuals and, therefore, it is not just
the intellectual work of a small number of judges.
Each of the five chapters of the book resorts to a different tool for analysing the judi-
cial bureaucracy: the legal space, the building where the Supreme Court is located and its
judgements are adopted; the judicial documents, especially the judicial file; the ability to
declare the inadmissibility of cases; the individuals that compose the judicial bureau-
cracy and act ‘behind the scenes’; and the idea of the public performance of the Court.
In fact, the author uses these ‘mundane’ judicial objects, documents and practices, which
have a judicial ruling as an end result, as the means to obtain knowledge about how the
Supreme Court actually works. Furthermore, an idea that can be found in every chapter is
the dynamics between the inside/outside of the Supreme Court of Justice.
The first chapter deals with the idea of a ‘judicial space’, and it engages in a descrip-
tion of the building in which the Supreme Court of Justice and other domestic courts are
located. It explains how the offices belonging to the Supreme Court have grown in num-
ber during the past years. This is actually coincidental with the growing number of law-
yers working for the Court, which the author mentions have grown from around 30 in the
280 Social & Legal Studies 23(2)
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