Performing The Court: Forms And Practices Of Legal Knowledge-Making In Argentina

This dissertation is about the practices of legal knowledge-making within the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice. It does not offer an analysis of judicial decisions, or the modes of legal reasoning. Nor does it further the idea of law as a problem solving tool. Rather, it examines, in the ethnographic mode, the practices of the subjects who actively participate in the making of the law, understanding these practices as a means of crafting the law, a technique of lawmaking. Accordingly, this work provides a fine-grained description of the mundane aspect of judicial practice: the workings of the legal bureaucracy-the quotidian world of files, reports, memoranda and hearings, among others, that are quintessential instruments of legal knowledge-making practices. But yet, it brings to the surface the different sets of social relations that emerge from these practices, even from those that work on the most routine grounds. More broadly, this project engages in an interdisciplinary method of analysis of knowledge production and circulation practices based on theoretical contributions from different areas of socio-legal scholarly concern like legal anthropology, law and society, comparative law and contemporary social thought. Science and Technology Studies- insight about the production and circulation of knowledge is particularly relevant to this work as it advances the appreciation of legal knowledge as part of a larger network of knowledge practices rather than an isolated outcome (namely, the judicial decision), or the result of the actions of a few individuals, for instance, judges