The fascination of legal proceedings is, naturally, different for professional researchers. Sociologists and criminologists consider trials as crucial elements of justice systems. At stake is the public legitimisation of punishment, the restoration of the moral economy, and the monopolisation of state power. Legitimisation through procedure, it is said, requires grounded, unbiased and efficient trials.

Accordingly, some alarming research is done on the ideology of legal professionals, on the mistreatment of certain offences, on procedural flaws, on the horrors of the legal machinery. Although useful in various aspects, many of these studies suffer shortcomings. As the Ethnomethodologist Michael Lynch put it: they “tend to describe various ‘social’ influences on the growth and development of legal institutions while taking for granted that lawyers write briefs, present cases, interrogate witnesses, and engage in legal reasoning”. (Scientific practice and ordinary action. Cambridge University Press 1993, 114) In other words, the law and its cases is taken for granted, while it is in fact a complex practical accomplishment.

How, we ask accordingly, are these accomplishments achieved and integrated in spatiotemporal expanded work-processes? For instance, how are criminal defences set in motion? How are legal statements put together? How are they rendered available for all practical purposes? And how does the production of cases vary in procedural systems? We are, to put short, after the practical grounds and the systematic effects of criminal proceedings: the trans-sequential activities - within events and in between events - by which legal facts and legal positions are brought into existance.

But is this at all relevant for legal scholars and practitioners? Does this matter at all? We expect the results to teach a good deal on the socio-material constitution of legal work, on the spatiotemporal divisions of labour, and on the variety of contingent solutions for analogous problems. Our comparative ethnography puts an emphasis on the timing and the temporalities of legal discourse: the pasts and futures of current dealings.