Imaginaries of judicial practice among legal experts in Argentina

Abstract

Leticia Barrera´s chapter elaborates on different perceptions of justice among legal experts that she encountered during her field research in the Argentine Supreme Court. She draws on ethnographic examples involving interactions between legal scholars/civil rights activists, and judicial agents, to point out these communities of experts´ contrasting opinions about justice´s workings and domestic judicial practice. The disparate perceptions about justice referred in the chapter can be seen as different interpretations of the same phenomenon, which suggests a literal and symbolical divide between the inside and the outside of the judicial apparatus. However, rather than privileging one or the other side, the essay seeks to re-create them in a relational way, as presented to the author in the field. It is through the inter-subjective encounter, the author argues, that it is possible to appreciate the problem in its complexity: as the interplay of the subjective realm and the social order epitomized by a legal field that still is seen as in transition.