In Ambiguous Times and Spaces: The Everyday Assemblage of Lay Participation to Argentine Courthouses
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663920957378 |
| Author | Santiago Abel Amietta |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
In Ambiguous Times and
Spaces: The Everyday
Assemblage of Lay
Participation to Argentine
Courthouses
Santiago Abel Amietta
Keele University, UK
Abstract
Most sociolegal research on juries and other forms of lay participation in criminal justice
has been limited to questions of how lay people make decisions. This article proposes
expanding this focus through a conceptually and methodologically novel examination of
the recent incorporation of lay decision-makers in Argentina’s criminal justice system.
Based on fieldwork conducted in the province of C ´
ordoba, the article follows jurors as
they enter the courthouses, unsettle normalized everyday practices and spatiotemporal
arrangements, and encounter multiple authorities that define their role and legitimate
belonging therein. The work of these multiple entities, the article argues, locates jurors
in ambiguous situations between public and private spaces of the courthouses, and
ultimately accentuate their alterity vis-`
a-vis legal professionals. Drawing on an ethno-
graphic approach inspired in actor-network theory and on Mariana Valverde’s sociolegal
elaborations of Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope, the article looks at this judicial reform as a
site for fruitful examination of law’s multiscalar power dynamics, and it argues that legal
institutions be investigated as flexible, fragile, and contingent assemblages of practices
beyond their official representations.
Keywords
Actor-network theory, Argentina, chronotopes of law, courthouse ethnography, jury,
Latin America, lay participation
Corresponding author:
Santiago Abel Amietta, Chancellor’s Building CBB1.001, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK.
Email: s.amietta@keele.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2021, Vol. 30(4) 605–626
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663920957378
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Introduction
Hugo,
1
a janitor I befriended at C´ordoba’s main criminal courthouse during my field-
work in Argentina, was complaining about the ongoing pay struggle of municipality
workers. According to him (and the union-loathing media he was referencing), their
wages were an already unjustifiably high percentage of the city’s budget. To my reply
that such percentage was even higher in the judiciary, he argued, ‘Municipalities are
made of things: lamp posts, asphalt, traffic lights, parks, waste trucks .... The Judiciary
is people, at the end of the day it is people knowing things and making decisions’. He
concluded: ‘We just need paper and some printers, not much more’.
This conversation on what the judiciary is made of might have seemed to Hugo a bit
off-topic - he knew that I was interested in the incorporation of lay decision-makers into
criminal trials. Nevertheless, his statements captured the very core of my interests –
law’s materiality, the times and spaces of judicial practice and authority, and how these
are affected by the incorporation of lay participants into the assemblage of things,
people, and practices that make up the criminal justice system.
Although Argentina’s National Constitution has mentioned the criminal jury in three
separate clauses since its first version in 1853, no form of lay participation was imple-
mented in federal justice or in any of the provinces’ court systems until the 1980s
(Bergoglio, 2011; Cavallero and Hendler, 1988; Hendler, 2008).
2
With the return of
constitutional rule following the last dictatorship (which lasted from 1976 to 1983), a
process of legal and judicial reforms ensued, including profound modifications to federal
and provincial criminal processes. Although it was not at the core of the agenda of
international agencies or local reformers (Langer, 2007), the visibility of and activism
for lay participation in criminal adjudication increased during this period. The province
of C´ordoba reformed its constitution in 1986, allowing the incorporation of lay people to
the decision of judicial cases, and in 1991 passed the law enacting the country’s first
criminal mixed tribunal.
3
In 2004 the province brought into force a new system – a mixed
tribunal of eight lay persons and three judges who together decide verdicts by majority
rule. Jurors are summoned to take part in the decision of a single case (the most serious
murder cases and cases of public corruption).
4
This research follows jurors into C´ordoba’s criminal courthouses, and discusses how
their incorporation into routines, spaces, and procedures unsettles taken-for-granted
practices and boundaries. Jurors find themselves in places and schedules that were not
imagined or designed to include them, and they encounter regular inhabitants who find
cohabiting these time-spaces with them problematic. The conflicts that arise over jurors’
spatiotemporal belonging in courthouses’ everyday workings are adjudicated by and
through human and nonhuman entities, giving place to a fragile, contingent, and occa-
sionally contradictory aggregate of governance work that simultaneously grants lay
people with markers of status yet excludes them from physical and symbolic spaces.
My analysis finds that this network of authorities that claim some degree of jurisdiction
(Valverde, 2009, 2014a) over jurors’ legitimate location and status leaves lay people in
an ambiguous position between those who belong and those who are outsiders, forcing
them to navigate between public and private spaces of courthouses in ways that ulti-
mately accentuate their alterity vis-`a-vis jurists.
606 Social & Legal Studies 30(4)
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