Legal Rules in Practice

Baudouin Dupret is Directeur de Recherche at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and guest lecturer at the University of Louvain, Belgium. He has published extensively in the field of the sociology and anthropology of law, legislation and media, especially in the Middle East. He is the co-editor of Law At Work: Studies in Legal Ethnomethods and the author of Practices of Truth: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Arab Settings, Adjudication in Action: An Ethnomethodology of Law and Positive Law from the Muslim World.

This volume explores the ways in which legal practices are referred to and articulated with legal rules, considering the ways in which rules are invoked, interpreted or blurred, and asking how both legal practitioners and lay participants conceive of and participate in the construction of facts and rules in order to produce decisions.

Introduction: legal rules in practice: an exploration into law's life 1. Ruleness Part 1 : Ruleness and its relativity 2. No rule for the application of rules 3. The structure of the legal system and the emergence of the state 4. Equality, hierarchy, and the place of rules 5. Laws and proverbs: the making and unmaking of moral rules in historic Tibet Part 2: Materiality, artefactuality and idiosyncrasy of legal practices 6. Reading case files: the material organization of cases and the work of judges 7. Verbatim records and the testing ceremony: on the production of decidability in German asylum hearings 8. Craft skills and legal rules: how Australian magistrates make bail decisions 9. Vernacular visions of viral videos: Speaking for evidence that speaks for itself Part 3: Meaning and emotions in legal interpretation 10. Time to agree? rules, agreements and consent judgements in a Belgian family court 11. Law, emotions and categorizations: lightning a judicial blind spot: on the role of emotions inside the magistrate's decision making 12. Playing by the rules: the search for legal grounds in homosexuality cases - Indonesia, Lebanon, Egypt, Senegal