Beyond the Law's Ends: Files, Bureaucracy and Legal Knowledge

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.