Dupret2024

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Dupret2024
BibType ARTICLE
Key Dupret2024
Author(s) Baudouin Dupret, Jean-Noël Ferrié, Montassir Nicolas Oufkir, Alexis Blouët
Title ‘THIS IS NOT A PIPE!’ Judicial normality and obliteration of the obvious in a Moroccan case of Islamist terrorism
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Michael Lynch
Publisher
Year 2024
Language English
City
Month
Journal Ethnographic Studies
Volume 20
Number
Pages 102-124
URL Link
DOI 10.26034/lu.ethns.2024.6915
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
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Abstract

Considered from a praxeological perspective, the judicial process is a performance and an achievement in which all members compete to “make law”, i.e. to demonstrate their competence to act within this framework and to produce results that are, formally at least, in line with the requirements of procedural correctness and legal relevance. The judicial production of law is the routine accomplishment of a set of things seen and known, constrained by textual rules, precedents and professional practices, but neither remarkable nor noticed. This, at least, in ordinary contexts. In exceptional contexts — those of exceptional justice, for example — things are different. Here, the routine performance of legal work has more to do with the production of a formally plausible but effectively dubious fiction. Where, in ordinary contexts, we observe an unremarkable production of normality, in exceptional contexts, this production becomes remarkable due, on the one hand, to the observable gap between the facts-as-judicially-established and the facts-as-common-sense-can-assume, and, on the other, the motivations-as-judicially-formulated and the motivations-as-reasonably-imagined. In this contribution, we present a Moroccan case of Islamic ter-rorism, describe how it was handled by the Criminal Chamber of the Rabat Court of Appeal, which is responsible for terrorism cases, and report on the work of this court in producing a legal normality, at the cost of denying the obvious and asserting a surreal truth in which respect for form takes precedence over credibility.

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