The magistrate and Mr Moore: story-telling, narrative forensics and a judge’s experience of sentencing

Abstract

This article tells the story of ‘The magistrate and Mr Moore’, a true account of an Australian magistrate’s experience of sentencing a man for drink driving, and then considers the significance of this story to the fields of socio-legal studies and narrative inquiry. Firstly, it explores how an ethnographic research approach – a sort of immersion journalism – is a productive methodology to access the under-researched area of judges’ experiences of sentencing people. Secondly, based on interviews with judges and magistrates in the criminal justice system in New South Wales, as well as, in some cases, observations of their working lives, the article explores the ways in which the judicial act of sentencing in part involves a curious (and vexed) approach to legal narrative.