Events

Speaker: Lorna Cameron, Visiting Research Fellow, University of Warwick Law School

Chair: Daniel Matthews, University of Warwick Law School

Title: 'What the Courtroom Knows: Legal Consciousness, Presence and the Recognition of Legal Authority'

Abstract: The problem that law has is that for its authority to be recognised it must be encountered. Legality cannot be understood only in terms of the rules, principles and doctrinal propositions through which law describes itself. Law must also become perceptible and interpretable through the conditions in which people encounter it. But what does that encounter involve? And what enables us to recognise it as an encounter with law? What are the perceptual conditions through which legality becomes available to consciousness, and what part is played by the environments in which those encounters occur? What is it about a courtroom that makes it recognisable as a court, and what happens to that encounter when its ordinary conditions of presence are changed?

My research into the architecture of justice began a long time ago but was forced to evolve rapidly with the practical problem of how to design a courtroom in which jury trials could continue during the Covid-19 pandemic. Working with judges and lawyers on the Nightingale Courts exposed assumptions about courtroom experience that had rarely needed to be articulated. The process of re-designing the Crown Court provided a way of investigating what makes a court recognisable as a place of law, and to what aspects of that place we can attribute that sense of justice or at least of having ones’ day in court. The design process of a new trial court model revealed how much legal practice depends on things that are rarely articulated as legal knowledge: where people are positioned, what they can see and hear, how they move and communicate, and how the relationships between them are materially organised. I want to suggest that these are not simply the surroundings in which law happens. They are among the conditions through which legal authority becomes perceptible and recognisable. My interest, then, is not only in what law says or what legal institutions decide, but in how law becomes present to those who encounter it — and what this might tell us about legal consciousness, the rule of law and the rapidly changing conditions of justice. As digitalisation changes the nature of presence at the legal interface. To understand the consequences of this it surely helps to know more about how the artefacts and aesthetics of legal spaces work with human presence to generate a dynamic through which legal process and authority are perceived and understood. I suggest that rather than merely removing materiality from legal experience, digital participation transforms the material, spatial and sensory conditions through which law becomes perceptible. The question is how these changes affect the interpretative resources through which participants recognise one another, engage with legal process and experience its authority.