Introduction: A Grammar of Law in Context and Action

Abstract

Adjudication in Action observes the contextualized deployment of various practices and the activities of very diverse people who, in different capacities, found themselves involved in or faced with judicial institutions. More specifically, it describes the moral dimension of judicial activities and the judicial approach to questions of morality. It shows how the practical accomplishment of the law is performed and achieved in a necessarily moral way, and how this practical, legal cognition mediates and modulates the treatment of cases dealing with morality, e.g. sexual. In a Wittgenstein-inspired ethnomethodological way, it proposes a praxiological perspective which does not reduce the law to the mere provisions of a legal code, although it considers law on the books as an integral part of legal practice. Through the close description of people's orientation to and reification of legal categories, within the constraining framework of institutional settings, this book constitutes the first comprehensive study of law in action and context.