THE STAGING OF MAGISTRATES' JUSTICE

Abstract

Metaphoric critiques of judicial proceedings have been done by mainly American writers: Garfinkel (1956), Emerson (1967) and Blumberg (1967), for instance, have all used dramaturgical or game imagery in analyses of courtroom interaction. In England, on the other hand the concern has been different, and largely reformative. Analyses of sentencing patterns (Hood, 1962; King, 1972), surveys of the availability of legal aid (Patterson, 1971 ) and assessment of bailing procedures (Bottomley, 1970; Dell, 1970)—all have contributed to the current concern with improving, mainly by increas ing the availability of legal aid, the quality of justice in general and the quality of magistrates' justice in particular. Difficult though it would be to deny the immense contributions of the aforementioned studies, both the American theorists and the English investi gators have tended either to ignore or to take for granted other, equally consequential, dimensions of socio-legal control: the coercive structures of dread, awe and uncertainty depicted by Camus and Kafka; the coercive structures of resentment, frustration and absurdity depicted by Lewis Carroll and N. F. Simpson. That the masterly descriptions of a Kafka or a Camus are unlikely to be bettered by sociologists is obvious. The idea, however, that such surrealism and psychic coercion properly belong to the world of the French novel, rather than to the local magistrates' court in the High Street, is erroneous. In this paper, based on two years' observation of the Metro politan magistrates' courts, I shall argue that the staging of magistrates' justice in itself infuses the proceedings with a surrealism which atrophies defendants' ability to participate in them. The Magistrates' Court as a Theatre of the Absurd Traditionally and situationally, judicial proceedings are dramatic. Aristotle noted the importance of forensic oratory as a special device of legal rhetoric ; playwrights as diverse as Shakespeare and Shaw appreciated the dramatic value of a trial scene; lawyers have always been cognisant of rhetorical presentations. In 1950, nine years before Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a lawyer, Jerome Frank, discussed the conventional ascription of character which occurs in law courts and which is dependent upon the tacit dimensions of interpersonal knowledge. Such analyses are nowadays the familiar stuff of the dramaturgical perspectives in sociology. Yet people do not only ascribe character to each other. Furniture, stage-props, scenic devices, tacit schedul ing programmes, etiquettes of ritual address and reference—in short, all the paraphernalia of social occasions—are, both immediately and documentarily, indexed with consequential social meanings (Mannheim, 1952; Schutz,