The sixth chapter examines the relationship between coutumiers as texts that describe custom, and custom in practice. The difficulty with discussing this is that the coutumiers only begin to be cited in court records at the very end of the thirteenth century and very rarely even then. This was not unusual for the lay courts of northern France in this period, which cited ‘custom’ and not lawbooks or specific precedents. I discuss the relationship between the coutumiers and representations of practice – as filtered through its documentary record-keeping – in two ways. On one level, this chapter shows how at least some people were thinking about court cases that they presided over, took part in, witnessed or heard about. On another, this chapter demonstrates how the coutumier represents practice differently from other remaining records and how coutumier authors used what they saw in practice to extract principles and articulate general rules. Through the coutumiers, we can see how individual actors reshaped specific cases and transactions into general principles, and those general principles into a body of customary law.

Chapter 19 maps the field of legal translation practice, research and training, beginning with an overview of the history of legal translation and its reorientation from literalness towards functional, receiver-oriented approaches which ensure equivalent effects and perceive legal translation as an act of legal communication. The chapter identifies the key characteristics of legal translation, both intersystemic and institutional, and discusses attempts to standardize legal translation by way of an ISO standard. It reviews key research trends and methods in legal translation studies, and outlines the competencies that legal translators need to acquire, suggesting how these can be developed.

By 2020 law firms will be faced with a “tipping point” for a new talent strategy. Now is the time for all law firms to commit to becoming AI-ready by embracing a growth mindset, set aside the fear of failure and begin to develop internal AI practices.1

Whereas the preceding chapter has taken the case file as an object immediately present in the here-and-now of ongoing practices, this chapter highlights the case file not as materially but as a temporally recalcitrant object. It traces the case file’s procedural and institutional histories, paying attention in particular to the way these histories are evoked and negotiated in court. I show how the case file becomes implicated in struggles over “what really happened”, and distinguish between two modes in which it does so: on the one hand, the legal case file acts as an innocent transporter of facts and truth; on the other, it becomes visible as an object that has actively transformed and delineated the case in question. I propose the use of the notion of the temporally folded object to understand the specific operations of legal case files, and in so doing contribute to the theorization of legal temporalities more broadly. Methodologically, then, this chapter underscores the necessity to attend to the multiple ways histories and futures become implicated in the production of legal knowledges.

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.

In this chapter, I venture into the courtroom. There, I show, accounts are elicited, truth and falsehood are at stake, and the “soul” of the deviant subject becomes a matter of empirical interest: is s/he really sorry? Here, emphasize in particular the local, narrative production of remorse. How, in other words, do defendants manage to “perform remorse” in court? How do judges make sense of defendants’ remorsefulness? How is it weighed and evaluated, and what are its consequences to judicial decision-making? Drawing on informal conversations with judges and in-court observations, this chapter demonstrates the narrative texture of judicial sense-making and decision-making, and the possible tensions that may arise between pursuing self-defense as a defense strategy and appearing sufficiently remorseful. I also show how narratives are subject to practices of typification, distinguishing between three typified whole-case narratives: the typical “angry young man”, the typical drug-addict, and the typical “explosive couple”. These three typified whole-case narratives help judges to make sense of and weigh defendants’ demonstrations of remorse. Here, I also highlight the methodological affordances of observation and informal conversation in shedding light on the narrative texture of legal practices, and contrast this emphasis on narrative with statistical approaches to judicial decision-making.

An experience gap has opened up in the development of legal professionals. The workplace-based experiences (traineeships and articles of clerkship) that were once pivotal to the progress of law graduates from student to practitioner are either no longer available or are much diminished in scope and scale. Graduates are expected to have accessed such experiences through other avenues. This is a particular challenge for those law graduates who lack the family and social connections to help them start their engagement with the profession. In response to these changing circumstances Monash University has instituted a Clinical Guarantee assuring every law student a place in its Clinical Legal Education (CLE) programme if they so choose. In this chapter, we describe the Clinical Guarantee initiative, our progress to date, the way in which we have used technology to support provision and the challenges we have faced during implementation. We conclude by emphasising the value of CLE as preparation for modern legal practice, and outlining our intention to measure that value through future evaluation work. This chapter tells an Australian story, but one which resonates with experiences in other jurisdictions.