5 - Visualizing Cases

Summary

This chapter highlights judicial file-work backstage. It is particularly interested in the socially distributed and materially mediated character of these practices, and zooms in on the techniques judges have developed to navigate case files accurately and efficiently. It also traces how these work practices were disrupted and rearticulation as a result of the digitization of legal case files. In so doing, this chapter shows how an emphasis on this non-human actor – the legal case file – can rearticulate understandings of judicial decision-making and rule-following that locate it in the “head of the judge”. Tracing how and where judges draw on the legal case file in their sense-making, this chapter instead treats both judicial thinking and seeing as empirically investigable phenomena, and suggests that our conceptions of legal practices can benefit from paying attention to the materiality of legal case files. In so doing, it treats case files not (only) as informational objects, but materially recalcitrant objects that shape and direct judicial attention in specific ways.