PWatson2025
| PWatson2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | PWatson2025 |
| Author(s) | Patrick G. Watson |
| Title | The Ethnomethods of Law and Order; Studying Cops and Courts |
| Editor(s) | Andrew P. Carlin, Alex Dennis, K. Neil Jenkings, Oskar Lindwall, Michael Mair |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Law, Courts, Police |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Abingdon, UK |
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| Pages | 390–398 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780429323904-39 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology |
| Chapter | 34 |
Abstract
As much as courts of law and police occupational practice are technical domains featuring intense training and high degrees of specialisation, they also trade on two notions borrowed from everyday life: discretion and common sense. Police are empowered to exercise their professional discretion when administering to candidate “crime” problems and courts, especially through juries, are empowered to employ “common sense” reasoning in evaluating cases brought before them. As Michael Lynch has argued, these factors make these sites “perspicuous settings” for ethnomethodological inquiry.. Following police work and court work demonstrates for the EM/CA scholar the mutually constitutive production of rules and order in lived interactional circumstance. This chapter examines the history of EM/CA research on policing and courts, and attends closely to these notions of common-sense reasoning and discretion as they apply to this work. It also introduces future directions for EM/CA research in law domains in light of technological and social change. In short, these settings are where the rules are formally identified and applied. EM/CA’s focus on the situated rationality of working conditions, when applied to courts and police work, has incredible prospects for revealing the reasoning practices in the contentious field of law in society.
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