ICS Seminar Series

Indigenous Criminal trials, or more generally justice hearings, have long been a source of fascination for academics and popular audiences alike. The courtroom has been seen as a site of conflicts, the place where truth emerges and state violence measured out. Performances of justice have been seen as opportunities for reinforcing social values, shaping identities and enacting legitimacy. This paper provides a review of different traditions of interpreting justice rituals and spaces, bringing together several methodologies to try to make sense of the strange world of the courtroom. It represents an outline of a book project that tries to integrate the insights of more than half a dozen rather disparate published papers I have written in the last 15 years, organised around a set of simple questions: 1. How does the technological and architectural configuration of courtrooms affect the outcomes of cases? Case studies in this section include a randomised controlled trial in the Parramatta Trial Courts showing the prejudicial effect of the dock – an enclosure in which accused people are placed in the courtroom; plus an analysis of modern Irish courts. 2. How do justice processes produce subjects? Case studies in this section include a comparison of a restorative justice process in South Australia with a children’s court hearing in France. 3. How do rituals work to create dignity and humanise justice participants? Case studies in this section are based on observations in Koori courts, mental health and guardianship tribunals and Danish courts. The paper will include a short film that provides the proof of concept of a virtual court, one in which the ‘courtroom’ is a fiction created entirely by software. This is the first stage of a six-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project that will result in the development of rituals and spaces for hearings taking place in virtual reality