Search

Within the framework of the governmental censorship process implemented during the Spanish Enlightenment (1769-1810) we re-enact the processing of a printing licence, and characterize the documentary series produced, the various archives where it is preserved, and their descriptive tools. The need lies in the fact that, as the process involves various institutions, the extensive documentary series that allows us to reconstruct a book censorship process is divided, which has produced some disconnections and some distortions in research, though each item only acquires full meaning in the context of the procedure in which it is produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to reflect on the judicial bureaucracy from a point of view focused on the interaction between people and objects. In other words, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the configuration of the State from the different links between objects (files) and people (officers and citizens). For this purpose, the article is divided in three sections. The first section makes a bibliographical balance of the way (form) in which how courts and files have been researched in and outside the country. Then we have the ethnographic description of the office, explaining the positions and functions of the employees, and the cycle that files go through in them. Finally, we carry out a theoretical reflection on the materiality of justice based on ethnographical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author summarises the contents of the newly enacted Marine Navigation Act, solely and exclusively with regard to the actions of notaries public. Its first section deals succinctly with the nuances regarding documentation, where notaries public have previously been involved; and the second analyses the new power attributed to Commissioners for Oaths in the so-called "public certificates of certain files in maritime law", a power that previously corresponded to exclusively to the Courts. Its practical application, however, is going to raise numerous doubts that the author attempts to bring to light, especially in scenarios involving Memoranda whereby the notary public organizes the deposit of goods not collected or not paid for at the port of arrival, their appraisal and sale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Files, memoranda, and paperwork in general, are seen as routine instruments of bureaucratic practice, the means for achieving an end: the legal decision. Consequently, the analysis tends to focus on the 'results' of institutional acts but not on the process of institutionalization that files entail. Therefore law is apprehended by its ends and the legal analysis is kept within the epistemological boundaries of the same ends. In this essay, I propose to bring attention to legal files as analytical objects in their own terms. To do so, I elaborate, in the ethnographic mode, on my personal file as it unfolded in my fieldwork in the Argentine Supreme Court from August 2005 to February 2007. In looking at the file as an artifact of knowledge, I seek to bring to the surface aspects of lawmaking that remain a blind spot of socio-legal studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]