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Making Law at The Doorway: The Clerk, the Court, and The Construction of Community in a New England Town

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Barbara Yngvesson
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Abstract

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This paper analyzes the politics of disputing in complaint hearings held by the court clerk in a district criminal court in Massachusetts. By examining struggles over the meaning of local conflicts, it suggests the implications of detailed studies of dispute processing for our understanding of how systems of legal and social meanings are constituted and reproduced. The paper argues that the work of the court, the roles played by court officials, and the meaning of law and of community at particular moments in time are shaped in the interaction of court staff with local citizens. At the same time, it argues that these interactions are constrained by culturally and historically embedded relations of class, ethnicity, and power. Thus the paper suggests how the practice of complaint hearings both reproduces and transforms systemic inequalities and oppositions, and points to the importance of interactive rather than dichotomizing approaches for studying the interconnection and interpenetration of law with society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , 1988 , pp. 409 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

The research on which this article is based was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant SES 81-22066. Research assistance was provided by Randi Silnutzer, whose skill and dedication in helping with the field work was invaluable. I also want to thank David Engel, Robert Gordon, Christine Harrington, Maureen Mahoney, Lynn Mather, Lester Mazor, and Frank Munger for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Conversations with David Engel and Carol Greenhouse on a related project have also contributed to the shaping of this one; and discussions of the paper at a meeting of the Amherst Seminar on Law and Ideology in September 1987 were helpful in sharpening and clarifying certain parts of my argument.

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Statute Cited

MASS. GEN. LAWS ANN. ch. 218, § 26, 30, 35A: 55; ch. 276, § 22 (West 1979).Google Scholar