This article traces the fraught history of the file system’s adoption by the Japanese Public Prosecutor’s Office (PPO) from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, when the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ), the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, decentralized the PPO’s power and transformed it into a “democratic” judicial agency. This is also a postwar history of the introduction of Taylorism-derived scientific management to white collar office work and Weberian visions of bureaucratic rationality into government offices, as part of the democratization of public administration steered by various sections within GHQ. Among the key changes was a guarantee of the right to receive a “speedy trial.” The essay argues that, while that guarantee was meant to secure human-rights protections for the accused, the file system introduced to the PPO translated the constitutional imperative of the rights of the accused into the pursuit of efficient scientific management, in which democracy was an operationalized socio-technical achievement. This logistical channel led to the co-emergence of democracy and modern rational bureaucracy, with each evincing mutual cause and effect. American reforms invested technicality with the promise of “democracy,” but as this essay shows, senior Japanese officials envisioned it as a means to rebuild a centralized information network.

Late colonial juridical practice in India was prone to bureaucratic errors and shared with the police a fundamental disinterest in the liberty of ordinary people. This article tells the politically marginal but highly revealing story of how a series of errors during the arrest and subsequent detention of an elderly man called Peter Budge—an innocent bystander in a situation of heightened communal tensions—led to a momentary scandal in the United Provinces administration in the year 1947–48. Peter's case disappeared between the cracks of bad record-keeping, leading to his lengthy and unlawful detention. It raises important questions about the complementary relation between law and violence, and the fictitious nature of public-order laws. In contrast to the scholarship that has discussed the spectacular violence of the state, this article looks at the ‘other’ acts of violence of the state and argues that the everyday reality of public-order enforcement is key to understanding the nature and operations of the late colonial and post-colonial state.

Paperwork has always been a central part of bureaucratic work. Over the last few years, bureaucratic procedures have become increasingly standardised and digitalised. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork within welfare offices in Switzerland and Belgium, we reflect on the way evidence is constructed within social policy and cases built for or against noncitizen welfare recipients in order to show how paper truths are established and challenged. The focus on digital practices within public policy implementation highlights how it contributes to enhanced control mechanisms on the implementation level and how migration law continues to guide welfare governance for noncitizens. This allows targeting of the most marginalised groups, whose rights to access state support are institutionally impeded. Through database information flows, official forms, paper reports and face-to-face meetings, we further show how a hybrid form of bureaucratic work emerges, where direct contact with the client is still key, yet highly influenced by standardisation processes.

Arguing for renewed attention to legal status as a problem of material forms and the practices around them, this paper builds, from an examination of documents in use, a theory of how competing notions of personhood shape legal status for Burmese people in Mae Sot, Thailand. It finds that there exist in Mae Sot two modes of documentary practice through which the legal status of Burmese people is apprehended. “Modes of documentary practice” refer not only to records, papers, certificates, cards, and forms, but to the patterns of filling in, wielding, explaining, and referencing a variety of print matter. The two modes identified in this paper exist in a feedback loop, with the result that Burmese people in Mae Sot are increasingly individuated as being part of a group for whom legal status is irrelevant and legal indistinctiveness is the norm.