Moral Communication in Court
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Book chapter › Research › peer-review
Standard
Moral Communication in Court. / Johansen, Louise Victoria; Laursen, Julie.
Courtroom Ethnography: Exploring Contemporary Approaches, Fieldwork and Challenges. ed. / Lisa Flower; Sarah Klosterkamp. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. p. 161-177.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Book chapter › Research › peer-review
Harvard
APA
Vancouver
Author
Bibtex
}
RIS
TY - CHAP
T1 - Moral Communication in Court
AU - Johansen, Louise Victoria
AU - Laursen, Julie
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - This article compares the ways in which judges in Denmark communicate punishment to defendants in common assault cases, and in very serious cases where the prosecution has claimed an indeterminate sentence. Danish judges generally take on a reserved role during trial, and they depend on a range of other professionals to make their judgement, thus ‘morally outsourcing’ their judgement to other experts such as psychiatrists, psychologists and probationers. Communication in the court cases we observed is thus shaped by affiliated professional actors’ written evaluations as much as it is by what goes on inside the court. These findings have implications for researchers embarking on fieldwork in courts in the sense that it is neither possible nor desirable to draw clear distinctions between spoken and written communication. Hence, the richest data on moral communication might be found in among what is said and written. The tacit knowledge of the professionals in a court setting is intertwined with other experts’ knowledge and can thus not be understood in a vacuum. Our main argument is that if we wish to understand communication in courts, we need to expand our analytical framework beyond their parameters
AB - This article compares the ways in which judges in Denmark communicate punishment to defendants in common assault cases, and in very serious cases where the prosecution has claimed an indeterminate sentence. Danish judges generally take on a reserved role during trial, and they depend on a range of other professionals to make their judgement, thus ‘morally outsourcing’ their judgement to other experts such as psychiatrists, psychologists and probationers. Communication in the court cases we observed is thus shaped by affiliated professional actors’ written evaluations as much as it is by what goes on inside the court. These findings have implications for researchers embarking on fieldwork in courts in the sense that it is neither possible nor desirable to draw clear distinctions between spoken and written communication. Hence, the richest data on moral communication might be found in among what is said and written. The tacit knowledge of the professionals in a court setting is intertwined with other experts’ knowledge and can thus not be understood in a vacuum. Our main argument is that if we wish to understand communication in courts, we need to expand our analytical framework beyond their parameters
UR - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-37985-7_11
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-37985-7_11
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-37985-7_11
M3 - Book chapter
SN - 9783031379840
SP - 161
EP - 177
BT - Courtroom Ethnography
A2 - Flower, Lisa
A2 - Klosterkamp, Sarah
PB - Palgrave Macmillan
ER -
ID: 374658723