This project will examine the disjuncture between the ideas about what law is in a post-Soviet socialist state and the legal practices guiding everyday life by examining how these logics run up against each other in the context of legal proceedings. While the legal system is dedicated to shaping a nation and a citizenry that adheres to a particular socialist ideology, everyday legal practices still attend to familiar concepts of responsibility. In any one case, legal officials' decisions can illuminate tensions between the state's ideas and everyday legal life. Through participant observation and interviews in a municipal court, a law office, and amongst families undertaking activities of daily living, this research seeks to answer: (1) how participants in the legal system judges, lawyers, and litigants?reconcile the disjuncture between the understandings of the state and everyday life as they navigate each legal case; and (2) what the consequences of their practices might be. Taken together these questions help us to understand how, through their attempts to resolve cases, the participants in the legal system may perhaps unwittingly reshape the contours of what it means to be a citizen in a contemporary post-Soviet socialist state.
This research will represent one of the first sustained ethnographic studies of law in a contemporary post-Soviet state and can contribute to studies of the complex relationships between the law, the nation, and the state. Further, it has the potential to broaden the conversation within the fields of law and social science by inviting seldom-heard voices?specifically those of legal professionals in a post-Soviet state?that can share the unique experiences of a socialist legal system.
The initial project design was adjusted to accommodate difficulties in procuring the appropriate research visa. Instead of being situated in Cuba as originally intended, the research for this project took place in Trinidad & Tobago, where the investigator proposed to study tensions between nationalist and regionalist ideologies as they confronted each other in the newly established Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). As the research progressed, the nature of the research inquiry expanded. What follows is a description of the research project as it evolved during the course of data collection. Based on a total of approximately 14-months of participant-observation, interviews, and archival research at the CCJ, this project addresses the question of how a legal institution like the CCJ works to create its authoritative legal voice. The Court is intended to serve many of the independent nation-states of the English-speaking Caribbean, but these states and their publics tend to view the Court with hesitation and suspicion. They place the CCJ alongside a history of regional experiments that have stalled, stagnated, or failed. Additionally, the fact that the CCJ promises to cut the last strings of colonialism by replacing the Privy Council in England as the final court of appeal does little to bolster its authority for a public that remains devoted to the perceived superiority of British law and order. As a result of its precarious positioning, the CCJ operates anxiously, striving in much that it does, says, signals, or portrays to find a balance between colonial court-ness, independent Caribbean-ness, regionalism, nationalism, past, future, passion and logical persuasion in order to establish an authoritative foothold in the very region it is designed to serve. This dissertation, then, explores the ways in which the CCJ, through both its mudane practices and its extraordinary events, attempts to construct a scaffolding upon which its authoritative legal voice—its jurisdiction—can be perched. Such research contributes to a greater understanding of not only the CCJ but also of other newly created transnational courts, of which there are an ever-increasing number around the world. It reveals the difficulties faced by these courts in the founding of their legitimacy and authority in the face of vestigial structures of colonial inequality and contemporary geopolitical concerns, and it analyzes the broad-spectrum strategies utlized by one such court to confront such obstacles.
