This chapter uncovers the theoretical dimensions of the controversy over knowledge highlighted in Chapter 1. I show how in this controversy, the demarcation between science and law, knowledge and judgment, the is and the ought is at stake. Tracing this distinction through both legal positivist thought and sociological approaches to the law, I emphasize in particular the limitations of such theoretical exercises. In their abstractionism, they fail to offer us the tools for thinking through, and thinking with, the controversy introduced in Chapter 1. The law-science conundrum, I argue, needs a pragmatic respecification. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy, the social study of knowledge practices, and ethnomethodology I seek to ask not, what is the law, but rather: where and how is it done? Neither do I want to know what (social) science, essentially, is. Again, the more productive question to ask is: how and where does it take place? And what are the performative effects of social scientists’ attempts to understand legal practice? Emphasizing actually occurring, unfolding legal practices over abstract “Law”, this chapter offers the conceptual tools necessary to venture into the field.

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.