 Stories
Stories on fights, assault, robbery, murder … one main reason for the
common fascination for criminal law derives from all these stories told in court.
Stories are the substance of criminal cases. They are allegedly about what ‘really
happened’ and convey it to the procedural public.
Legal stories are linear. They enfold in an ‘and than’ fashion, flanked
by temporal and spatial details to validate the content. They surface in police interviews
or in the law firm’s conference with the client. Further on, accounts are exchanged
by the competing parties and enter, if acknowledged as beneficial, the final stage
in court. It is this re-use of stories that adds an underlying means to the judicial
truth-engine that is supposed to keep the legal matters in touch with ‘the
world out there’.
Stories are commonly analysed as intentional utterances. The author is given
a pivotal role. It is her/his intention that shall be revealed by interpretation.
The discourse analysis, employed here, takes another point of departure. Similar
to Foucault, stories are understood as things that circulate and cause various
effects no matter the intention going with it in the first place. In this way,
stories become observable as effective in different circumstances. They are “quoted” (Derrida)
several times and bound their users to their procedural history.
By following a story on its way to court, the analysis discovers the obligatory
career to be passed. The career goes along with social recognition and with circles
of publication. Ideally speaking, a story leaves the solicitor’s office,
enters the whole ensemble and is disclosed to the opponent prior to the trial
in court. This course of mobilisation reflects the expectations and calculations
of those authorising it. The further a story is mobilised and the bigger
the role it plays, the more it is exposed to undermining.
- Courtroom
- Files
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 New activities
Special Issue on "Law and Biography" in BIOS
Call for Abstracts/French-German Conference on “Enfermement/Freiheitsentzug”
Latest Texts/Books
My ethnography on the English Crown Court procedure by BRILL
Review
Our comparative ethnography of criminal defence work in different procedural
regimes by PALGRAVE
Teaching in SS 2011
Scheffer: „Einführung in die Institutionelle Ethnographie“ Kurs in Moodle
Scheffer: „Was tun Verfahren? Eine sozialwissenschaftliche Debatte“ Kurs in Moodle
Scheffer: „Arbeitskreis politische Ethnographie“ Termine in Moodle
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THE CASE STUDIES
Stories
