1 - Troubling Encounters

Summary

In March 2012, a study into sentencing disparities shocks the Dutch Judiciary. Three researchers of the University of Leiden, using in-court observations and statistical analyses, have demonstrated that defendants’ “foreign” or Dutch “appearance” influence judges’ sentencing decisions: these defendants are usually punished more harshly than the native Dutch. Practicing judges react to the study in frustration, raising the question whether researchers have “any idea” as to how judges “deal with cases”. Here, I take their objections to this controversial study seriously: not only as an implicit critique of social scientific knowledge production about legal practices, but also as being reflective of wholly different ways of seeing and constructing cases. I raise three questions: First, how do judges deal with cases? How do they evaluate evidence, construct or deconstruct different story-lines, how do they come to “see” the case? Secondly, what do social scientific observers see (and not see) when they try to describe, understand and explain these practices, and how do their methodological choices and theoretical assumptions shape their accounts? Third, what do I do when I try to research and describe these practices, that is: how do my own positionings, assumptions, and methodological choices affect the knowledge I produce?