Courts-as-bureaucracies

Scholarly work in the social sciences has described the “bureaucratization” of criminal justice systems, denouncing the introduction of managerial logics into legal fields. This paper contributes to that work by focusing on the characteristics of criminal justice organizations that make them “bureaucracies”. Drawing on observations in lower criminal courts in Santiago, Chile, I show that these organizations face the same challenges as other bureaucracies: They manage many cases simultaneously, they rely on both formal and informal classifications to address them, and they move each case forward by transferring it either to another organization or into another legal procedure. In doing so, they render cases legible in ways that depend less on the specificities of one case and more on the coordinated labor that leads to the judicial and administrative “death” of the case. This, far from being solely the result of a trend toward the managerialization of the justice system, is tied to the very nature of law.