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Court ethnographies have commonly relied on the physical presence of the ethnographers. This paper explores the opportunities and the challenges of conducting court ethnographies without this physical presence. Specifically, it examines what it means to conduct remote ethnographies of legal processes where neither the ethnographer nor the other hearing participants are physically co‐present. The sudden shift towards remote hearings in fieldwork conducted during the COVID‐19 pandemic presented an opportunity to compare in‐person and remote ethnographic methods. Through a case study of bail hearings in the immigration tribunal in the UK, this paper explores the value and challenges associated with conducting remote ethnographies and asks how they can help to shed light on the impact of absences in legal events. Court ethnographies have commonly relied on the physical presence of the ethnographers. This paper explores the opportunities and the challenges of conducting court ethnographies without this physical presence. Specifically, it examines what it means to conduct remote ethnographies of legal processes where neither the ethnographer nor the other hearing participants are physically co‐present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal geography is experiencing a "practice turn." Understanding the material, spatial, and embodied characteristics of law is illuminating hitherto obscured experiences of justice, injustice, and political practice. It is contributions from scholars at the forefront of these concerns, from geography and cognate disciplines, that comprise the papers in the Practising legal geography special section. Across seven papers we are seeking to explore the ways in which a focus on practice can deepen our understanding of the methods and praxis of legal geography. Following an outline of its conceptual underpinnings and origins of the research, we give a short account of each of the papers and point to areas of future research for which they provide provocation. Practice emerges as much more than empirical detail – it is a perspective through which we can trace the operation of power and struggle in the making of law. Legal geography is experiencing a "practice turn." Understanding the material, spatial, and embodied characteristics of law is illuminating hitherto obscured experiences of justice, injustice, and political practice. It is contributions from scholars at the forefront of these concerns, from geography and cognate disciplines, that comprise the papers in the Practising Legal Geography special section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past five years, geographers' engagement in legal observation and/or intervention has begun to gain momentum, with a particular emphasis on the courtroom. Courtrooms are positioned as epicentres of law(yering) in‐action, yet their pre‐eminence should not deflect from efforts to build a more inclusionary geography of law attendant to other, less high‐profile and official, spaces of law. In this paper, I elaborate on this argument by interrogating a client consultation competition (CCC) that I co‐organised on domestic violence law with staff and students from a higher education institution in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The paper hones in specifically on the political interface that the CCC event fashioned between myself, the student competitors, and the state. Drawing on participant observation and audio‐recordings of the event, in addition to post‐competition focus groups I held with students, the paper demonstrates the value of cross‐pollinating social geographic work on events and encounter with legal‐oriented scholarship in the discipline on spaces and actors of law. Chased within the political, their fusing together permits researchers to widen their horizons beyond the court event and to think creatively about other legal infrastructures in which law and legal practice comes to be known and operationalised. The paper therefore asks that geographers committed to fostering justice not only step inside the courtroom, but also venture into spaces where its future prospects are born. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper sets out what courtwatching is and gives some examples from various countries. It argues that a closer engagement with courtwatching in legal geography will yield insights into the issues of visibility, publicness, witnessing, and embodiment that surround court observations. Courtwatching involves grassroots efforts to observe the day‐to‐day work of decision making in justice systems, usually undertaken by activists as a way to scrutinise and challenge the power of legal professionals such as judges. This paper argues for closer attention to courtwatching in legal geographical research. Numerous courtwatching programmes exist around the world, and the first part of the paper surveys some of these, giving a sense of their diversity, the challenges they can face, and the influence that they have. The second part of the paper uses courtwatching to explore questions of visibility, publicness, witnessing, and embodiment in legal research into courts, trials, and hearings. It argues that courtwatching highlights the complexity of legal publicness, problematising the binary notion of "closed" or "open" hearings, and also raises important questions about the ethical differences between watching and witnessing. Finally, in the context of proliferating ways in which courts are becoming public via digital means of watching, such as TV and podcasts, the paper asks what difference it makes to actually be there, in the flesh, to watch legal processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]