Praxeology

The praxeological study of law aims to analyze practices concerning what professional and lay people identify and treat as law. It seeks to describe the modalities of production and reproduction, the intelligibility and understanding, and the structuring and public character of law and its many legal activities.

Four principles characterize the praxeological approach. First, one pays attention to the means used to produce an action in a way that allows others to understand it. Second, one identifies social facts as ongoing [Page 1171]social and collaborative productions within culturally identified contexts. Third, one describes toward what participants in particular settings are oriented. Finally, one pays attention to people as rule-using, not ruledetermined, creatures.

In the praxeological perspective, which emanates from the work of Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks, many studies specifically dealt with legal and judicial activities. For instance, the fine collection by Max Travers and John Manzo includes the work of juries, attorneys, judges, and police officers. From a conversation analysis point of view, John Atkinson and Paul Drew, drawing from the transcription of a Northern Ireland court that dealt with sectarian disorders, were the first to study some of the main features of law in terms of turn-taking, sequentiality, cross-examination, accusations, justifications, and excuses.

Douglas Maynard closely studied the procedure of plea bargaining and its internal constraints, while Martha Komter dealt with the dilemmas that both judges and accused people face when interacting in a Dutch judicial process. Gregory Matoesian contributed two books on court language in rape trials. His studies shed light on language in the legal context and on how it constitutes and transforms evidence, facts, and rules in relevant objects of legal knowledge.

Following an ethnomethodological perspective, Michael Lynch and David Bogen analyzed the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings in the United States Congress and described the practical dimensions of procedural rules, narrative accounts, evidence production, and the use of memory in the context of hearings and interviews. In a more phenomenological tradition, Melvin Pollner scrutinized the functioning of mundane reason and its many postulates in the context of American traffic courts, although James Holstein focused on the practical ways through which courts ordered involuntary commitment. Max Travers contributed a book to the detailed study of daily legal work in a firm of criminal lawyers. Finally, Baudouin Dupret proposes a thorough analysis of law in action, its practical grammar, and its actual enfolding in the context of Egyptian courts dealing with the issue of public morality.