No longer happening, not yet resolved: The courthouse as a socio-temporal threshold

This article explores the courthouse as a socio-temporal threshold, where past harms are rearticulated and future outcomes are yet uncertain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two Swedish district courts, the study examines how courthouse architectures and atmospheres structure experiences of anticipation, uncertainty, and emotional dissonance for those navigating criminal trials. Drawing on sensory approaches within criminology, the analysis traces how courthouses materialize legal neutrality through affective absences (e.g. emotional restraint, sterile design) and spectral presences (e.g. punitive iconography, historical residues). The article shows how courthouses are not merely sites for adjudication, but charged environments that both manifest and obscure enduring hierarchies and tensions around justice; on individual as well as structural levels. In doing so, the article reconceptualizes the courthouse as a socio-legal space that collapses binaries of public/private, presence/absence, and past/future—offering new insights into how justice is imagined, encountered, and spatially embodied in legal spaces.