The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1998 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1998

Printed in the United States of America

14 13 12 11 10 09 08      5 6 7 8

ISBN: 978-0-226-21270-8 (ebook)

ISBN: 0-226-22742-1 (cloth)

ISBN: 0-226-22744-8 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The common place of law : stories from everyday life / Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey.

   p. cm.—(Language and legal discourse)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-22742-1 (cloth : alk. paper).—ISBN 0-226-22744-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Culture and law.    2. Sociological jurisprudence.    3. Law—United States—Case studies.    4. Law—New Jersey—Case studies.    I. Ewick, Patricia.    II. Silbey, Susan S.    III. Series.

K487.C8C657      1998

340'.115—dc21

97-45760

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Patricia Ewick & Susan S. Silbey

The Common Place of Law

Stories from Everyday Life

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

LANGUAGE AND LEGAL DISCOURSE

A series edited by William O’Barr and John M. Conley

The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process

Susan Berk-Seligson

Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse

John M. Conley and William O’Barr

Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans

Sally Engle Merry

The Language of Judges

Lawrence M. Solan

Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom

Gregory M. Matoesian

Rights at Work: Pay Equity and the Politics of Legal Mobilization

Michael W. McCann

Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order

Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth

Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourse of Disputing in Coastal Kenyan Islamic Courts

Susan F. Hirsch

Just Words: Law, Language, and Power

John M. Conley and William M. O’Barr

For Benjamin, Nicholas, Anna, and Jessica

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,

Law is the one

All gardeners obey

To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

Law is the wisdom of the old

The impotent grandfathers shrilly scold;

The granchildren put out a treble tongue,

Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,

Expounding to an unpriestly people,

Law is the words in my priestly book,

Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,

Speaking clearly and most severely,

Law is as I’ve told you before,

Law is as you know I suppose,

Law is but let me explain it once more,

Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:

Law is neither wrong nor right,

Law is only crime

Punished by place and by times,

Law is the clothes men wear

Anytime, anywhere,

Law is Good-morning and Good-night.

Others say, Law is our Fate:

Others say, Law is our State;

Others say, others say

Law is no more

Law has gone away.

W. H. AUDEN (1939)

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART ONE. Introduction

ONE. Millie Simpson

TWO. The Common Place of Law

THREE. The Social Construction of Legality

PART TWO. Stories of Legal Consciousness: Constructing Legality

FOUR. Before the Law

Rita Michaels

Dwayne Franklin

Standing before the Law

FIVE. With the Law

Charles Reed

Nikos Stavros

Playing with the Law

SIX. Against the Law

Bess Sherman

Jamie Leeson

Up against the Law

PART THREE. Conclusions

SEVEN. Mystery and Resolution: Reconciling the Irreconcilable

EIGHT. Consciousness and Contradiction

APPENDIX A. Research Strategies and Methods

APPENDIX B. Who’s Who in the Text

NOTES

REFERENCES

INDEX

PREFACE

American society is filled with signs of legal culture. Every package of food, piece of clothing, and electrical appliance contains a label warning us about its dangers, instructing us about its uses, and telling us to whom we can complain if something goes wrong. Every time we park a car, dry-clean clothing, or leave an umbrella in a cloakroom, we are informed about limited liabilities for loss. Newspapers, television, novels, plays, magazines, and movies are saturated with legal images, while these same cultural objects display their claims to copyright. Moreover, the pervasiveness of law is not a new phenomenon. More than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in America all issues eventually become legal matters. We began this book with the hope of understanding the basis of this American romance with law.

The Common Place of Law uses stories of everyday life to discover the different ways in which people use and think about law. What are the different conceptions of law that encourage some people to call a lawyer if their neighbor’s dog disturbs their trash, and others to accept the losses and pain that may be caused by defective products, unsuccessful surgery, or discrimination? To what degree do Americans understand their lives through legal concepts and processes? We explore the meanings of law in American lives, including the degree to which Americans may be enthusiastically using law; we also explore people’s resistance to using law. In short, we want to know what legality means in the daily lives of Americans.

This book began with a request from the New Jersey Supreme Court Task Force on Minority Concerns for help in trying to find out whether, and in what ways, there might be racial discrimination in the New Jersey courts. Specifically, the task force had suggested that one of the most important and detrimental forms of racial variation might be the differential voluntary use of law and courts by minority populations. It seemed plausible to the task force that when faced with the option of using legal procedures (calling the police, filing a grievance, or initiating a lawsuit), minorities were more likely than nonminorities to refrain. Put differently, if Americans have a romance with law, it is not a universal attraction.

The court’s request seemed to be an opportunity to put our professional skills to the service of a political project to which we are totally committed—racial equality. Agreeing to design a research project for the task force was the beginning of a seven-year involvement during which the project was transformed from a relatively circumscribed set of policy questions to an exploration of fundamental problems in social theory and legal culture. We convinced the task force that we could answer their questions about differential use of courts only if we could understand the taken-for-granted place of law in the lives of New Jersey citizens. To do so, we had to look at more than the courts, or even legal disputes and problems.

We decided to collect stories of everyday experiences from a large number of people, and in the course of these conversations to see if we could locate the place of law in American culture. Collecting stories and having conversations is not the usual way of describing social science research. But this is not, we hope, a usual project of either qualitative or quantitative social science. Rather, we have self-consciously attempted to combine several different methods and to work at the intersections of several fields of scholarship in response to contemporary controversies in sociology, cultural studies, and legal theory. We have combined aspects of textual interpretation with survey research to mediate debates about the place of subject and observer, authorship and representation, as well as reliability and accuracy in social research. We also hope to contribute to the growing field of cultural studies by focusing not only on the symbols and representations embedded in legal materials, but on the production and reception of legal culture by citizens. Finally, we have interwoven sociological theories of social structure and human agency with theories of social construction to develop a model of the lived experiences of legality, its varieties and dimensions. Thus, this book sits at the intersection of several literatures and should be of interest to scholars in most social sciences, as well as socio-legal studies, legal theory, and cultural studies.

In the end, we were able to respond to the court’s concerns and at the same time identify the various ways in which legality is understood and enacted in the daily lives of ordinary citizens. Once we had mapped the complex and contradictory fabric of legality, we also observed the continuity between popular and professional legal consciousness. In this sense, our analysis of popular legal consciousness confirms what other observers find when they look at professional legal practices and the ways in which formal legal institutions work: a persistent contradiction between the ideal and the actual in the law. One of the themes of this book is how this gap sustains rather than undermines legality.

Another theme of this book is the relationship among text, meaning, and authority. People write letters, save receipts, document events, and sign contracts because they know that getting it in writing makes a difference. It makes what they say more emphatic, more permanent, and more important (some say more legal). During our interviews people also reported loss and frustration associated with putting their words into writing. Sometimes their words were unread, filed away, or misinterpreted. In some cases, people decided later that they wanted to take some words back or change their minds, but couldn’t.

We have spent many years getting this in writing, as some respondents said. And for us there is the same pleasure and loss that they spoke of. Years of conversations have now assumed this final form. All of those spoken words, scribbled notes, cut and pasted text do seem more definitive as they appear here. They certainly have greater authority (being protected by copyright law and the conventions of social science citation practices). But for all that, there are the typical dangers and losses. Having assumed this form, the hundreds of interviews, conversations, half-formed as well as deliberate lines of analysis now have a life of their own. We can no longer change them and must live with our errors, omissions, the awkward phrases, undeveloped points, and misplaced commas.

But here is the place in the text where we can keep the process of writing (ongoing, tentative, always collaborative) alive. Here we can document the help, contributions, and support that we have received from many people over many years. We are grateful for the lively collegiality and the generous and supportive responses to urgent inquiries and uncertainties. The irony of our efforts to document and concretize this vital human process and these relationships in writing is not, however, lost on us. But in this instance we want to be loud and emphatic in our thanks, and we are confident we will not change our minds.

There are a number of people for whom we feel great affection and to whom we owe debts of many kinds. Marc Steinberg has been a penetrating reader and unfailing friend for many years. He is a master teacher, and we have benefited greatly from his gentle instruction. Ronen Shamir has been an intellectual provocateur who always has time for a hundred visions and revisions. His reading of earlier drafts helped to give shape and sophistication to our ideas. From the beginning, we were inspired by Rick Fantasia’s groundbreaking work on class consciousness and cultures of solidarity. More generally, we have been enriched, both personally and professionally, by Rick’s energy and passionate convictions. Austin Sarat has been a friend, collaborator, and thoughtful critic; his prodigious intellect, affection, and loyalty are unfailing and for all of these we are grateful.

One research assistant has been with us in this project from the very beginning. Although she served as interviewer, coder, and reader, Elizabeth Schuster McGeveran was as much a companion and collaborator, an all-purpose conscience keeping us focused and reliable throughout. One of the special joys has been to work with such an imaginative and capable student.

In large part, the impetus for framing the question of differential use of law as part of a broader question about the place of law in everyday life grew out of a fourteen-year-long conversation in the Amherst Seminar on Legal Ideology and Legal Process. For us, The Common Place of Law is the culmination of those discussions, bringing together diverse threads that preoccupied the seminar: power, ideology, resistance, social practice, and interpretation. Thus, we are particularly indebted to our colleagues in the Amherst Seminar: John Brigham, Kristin Bumiller, Sara Cobb, Christine Harrington, Sally Merry, Brinkley Messick, Ron Pipkin, Austin Sarat, Adelaide Villmoare, Barbara Yngvesson, and Larry Zacharias.

We would also like to thank Frank Munger, David Engel, and Bryant Garth, with whom we have been engaged for years in an ongoing discussion about legal consciousness and narrative. Joel Handler has kept us intellectually and politically honest. For nearly three decades, Egon Bittner and David Greenestone provided Susan unselfish instruction and unfailing wisdom for which she is particularly grateful. Many others have read various drafts of this work, engaged us in helpful conversations, and contributed ideas and insights. We have tried to learn from their suggestions: Estelle Lau, Dirk Hartog, Martha Minow, Alice Hearst, Keith Bybee, Jill Frank, Martha Umphrey, Vicky Spellman, Carroll Seron, Karen Orren, Owen Flanagan, John Conley, Mack O’Barr, Lauren Edelman, Kim Scheppelle, Marianne Constable, Gary Marx, and Yves Dezalay.

Both of us are lucky to work in intellectually congenial and supportive institutions. We would like to thank especially our colleagues in the Sociology Departments at Clark University (Bruce London, Deborah Merrill, Bob Ross, and Shelly Tenenbaum) and Wellesley College (Lee Cuba, Jonathan Imber, and Tom Cushman) for all of their help. Jens Kruse, Vernon Shetley, and Caroline Webb were all conscripted into the project at one time or another.

We also accumulated debts from the beginning of the project in New Jersey. We collaborated with Bill Chambliss and Howard Taylor when we began working for the New Jersey Supreme Court. Robert Joe Lee’s and Sylvia Breau’s competence at managing such a large project was instrumental in contributing to its success. John Blazer was one of the most skillful interviewers we have ever known.

One of the expected difficulties of taking on a project of this size is the continual need for assistance; one of the unexpected pleasures was the people who helped us. We are particularly indebted to their willingness to work unpredictable hours, sometimes at short notice, and too often with insufficiently specific instructions. We had many research assistants, some of whom enthusiastically taught us about resistant practices: Lisa Kaunelis, Tara Kominiak, Bethany Hoffman, Shanna Connor, Kathryn Hudak, Linda Puls, Rachel Onanian, Shanna Whitehead, Christy Agor, Ling Tang, Frances Ramberg, Ted Rooney, Laura Melbin, Jeremy Rudd, Diane Merians, Anna Silbey, Jessica Silbey, and Zachary Deutch.

We appreciate the financial support we received and without which this work would not have been possible. We were supported by grants from Clark University, Wellesley College, the State Justice Institute (A-89-081), the New Jersey Administrative Office of the Courts, and the National Science Foundation (SES 9123561). Portions of the book were written while on leaves supported by our institutions and by the American Association of University Women, Harvard Law School, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Susan is most grateful for the sparkling intellectual communities of the Villa Serbelloni, Bellaggio, Italy (Rockefeller Foundation) and the Maison Suger of the Maison de Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, which provided stimulation and challenge while she worked on portions of the book.

We are also grateful for permission to reprint some materials. Portions of chapter 1 originally appeared in Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey, Conformity, Contestation and Resistance: An Account of Legal Consciousness, New England Law Review 26 (1992): 731–49; © Copyright New England School of Law 1992; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission. Portions of chapter 2 originally appeared in Susan S. Silbey, Making a Place for a Cultural Analysis of Law, Law and Social Inquiry 17 (1992): 39–8; © Copyright 1992 by The American Bar Foundation; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Portions of chapter 3 originally appeared in Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey, Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative, Law and Society Review 29, no. 2 (1995): 197–226; reprinted by permission of the Law and Society Association. Portions of chapter 7 originally appeared in Patricia Ewick, Postmodern Melancholia, Law and Society Review 26, no. 4 (1992): 755–63; reprinted by permission of the Law and Society Association.

Finally, as we clean the files and save the disks, we know that we must declare the work done even as the relations, affections, and memories remain. We were friends before we were colleagues, and colleagues before we were official collaborators, and it does not end here. We say official collaborators because from the very beginning of our connection, there was a conspiracy between the two of us. Our professional lives had followed similarly irregular paths, and we often found ourselves observing from the peripheries of whatever group or institution we joined. We found that we not only shared a passion for sociology but for teaching it as well. Thus when we came to do this research together (from a combination of opportunity, political commitment, and financial inducement) we found a place to join our pleasure in gabbing about sociology and life with more professional but no less compelling desires. This book has been produced in our offices, on the beaches of West Falmouth, in a garden in Worcester, and a good part of it on the New Jersey Turnpike and at the Newark Airport. We pushed baby carriages while discussing Goffman and Giddens, and grounded ourselves literally (in our first joint sailing effort) as we found ourselves metaphorically beached on the shoals of narrative scholarship. We made heavy demands on our families—not so much for the time away, which was considerable, but because the time at home was often colonized by the endless talk about structures and schemas, Nikos and Bess. We want to thank our families. We owe them much. Thanks to Lee Cuba, friend for life, for things unimaginable. Thanks to Marion Ewick and Barbara Trocki for joyfully and generously becoming nannies, or whatever else they needed to be, at a moment’s notice. Thanks to Alma and Dick Merians for their help in more ways than we can possibly acknowledge. Thanks to Annie and Jess for being willing to join the corps. And, thanks to Bobby for being, always.

PART ONE

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Millie Simpson

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid building of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks.

ERVING GOFFMAN, Asylums

[T]here is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case; . . . resistances . . . are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space in varying densities, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior . . . Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities.

MICHEL FOUCAULT, The History of Sexuality

For close to nine years, Millie Simpson drove each weekday from her apartment in the South Ward section of Newark to Carol and Bob Richards’s ten-room stone-fronted colonial house in suburban Short Hills, where she worked as a housekeeper. Although Millie couldn’t afford to buy a new car, nor to service her old one regularly, an automobile was nonetheless important for traveling the ten miles to and from work. It was, in addition, necessary for the work she performed for the Richards family—picking up groceries and dry cleaning, and in recent years transporting Mr. Richards’s elderly parents around town. During these nine years, Millie Simpson had owned seven older, gas-guzzling, American-made clunkers. Her cars regularly fell victim to accidents, breakdowns, and thefts. There were several times in the nine years when she was without an automobile. With great difficulty and time, she would take a bus and then a train from Newark, or have a friend drive her to the Richardses’ home and then use one of the family cars to do the household errands.¹

In late October 1989, Millie Simpson arrived at work by train, cleaned the house, and left a note for Carol Richards saying that she could not drive and would be unable to do errands for a while. Carol and Millie had found that notes left on the kitchen table were the most reliable means of communication between them. Face-to-face and telephone conversations were rare. Carol left for work before Millie arrived in the morning, returning home after Millie left, and they had never gotten into the habit of telephoning because Millie’s number was often changed and the service was sometimes disconnected. Millie spoke regularly, however, with the younger Richards child, Judy, a teenage girl who was often at home in the afternoons. This is the story, as Millie Simpson told it to Judy, then to Carol Richards, and later to us.

Several months earlier, for a period of two to three weeks, Millie had parked her 1984 Mercury in front of her apartment building and had been having a friend drive her to and from work. She was short of cash and didn’t have the money to make an insurance payment; she needed time to collect the cash and she didn’t want to use the car while it was uninsured. Early one morning, the police arrived and served her with summonses for leaving the scene of an accident and driving an uninsured vehicle. Millie was incredulous and explained that she had not been using the car because it was uninsured. The summonses were served nonetheless. Frustrated that the police would not investigate her claims, Millie began making inquiries and found that a friend of her son’s, who had been staying with her, had taken the keys to the car without her permission. After backing into the car parked behind Millie’s, he then went for a ride and returned the car before the police arrived or Millie noticed that it had been missing. The car had been returned to the same spot where Millie had left it, but now with a dent in its rear end.

Millie Simpson appeared in court on the day noted on the summonses. When asked by the judge whether she wished to plead guilty, she replied no, she was not guilty. Surprised, the judge asked whether her car was insured and whether she had left the scene of an accident. She answered that it was true that the car had not been insured, so she must be guilty of that; but she had not been driving it and therefore was not involved in nor did she leave any accident. She explained to the judge that her car had been used without permission by her son’s friend, and the young man had been in the accident. According to Millie, the judge said that he would mark her plea not guilty because she was not driving the car and that he would set another date for a hearing. (Here there is some disagreement between Millie Simpson’s account and the official record, which indicates that Millie did plead guilty.) The judge also asked whether she wanted a public defender. Millie said yes and, after filling out some papers in another office in the courthouse, was assigned a lawyer.

A few weeks later, never having heard from her public defender, Millie Simpson appeared in court, once again without an attorney. The judge had a packet of papers in front of him, which Millie believed contained the information she had reported during her first appearance. As a result, Millie did not explain at this second appearance, as she had at the first, what had happened to her car. Without any discussion, she claims, the judge found her guilty and told her that her license was being suspended for a year, that she would have to pay three hundred dollars in fines and serve fifteen hours of community service. The public defender showed up at this point, Millie says, after the judge had finished with her.

Upon hearing Millie Simpson’s story from their daughter, and filling in details about the whereabouts of the car, the involvement of Millie’s son’s friend, Millie’s actions and responsibility, and the lack of involvement of the public defender, Bob and Carol Richards decided to have an attorney see if anything could be done for Millie. Bob Richards referred the matter to the law firm that was counsel to his company. A litigator for the firm met with Millie. After investigating the status of the case in the court records and discovering that the record indicated that Millie Simpson had pleaded guilty, the attorney, David Stone, filed a motion to have the case reopened and to withdraw the plea. Stone then appeared before the court, on the record, and asserted that Millie Simpson had appeared in court a few weeks prior, without a lawyer, and although she had stated that she understood what was going on, she, in fact, did not recognize the seriousness of the charges nor the implications of being found guilty. Stone also spoke with the prosecutor’s office, which said that it would take no position and would have no problem if the judge was willing to reopen the case, which indeed he was.

Four to five weeks later, attorney David Stone and Millie Simpson again appeared before Judge Tyler, the same judge who had found Millie Simpson guilty and with whom David Stone had met to reopen the case. At this final appearance, Stone presented the facts, the same facts that Millie Simpson had been reporting from the outset—that she wasn’t operating the car and had not been using it because it was uninsured; that someone had stolen it and had been in an accident and had left the scene, but not her. No witnesses were called, no corroborating evidence was offered, and Millie was not asked to testify. The court found her not guilty and dismissed the charges. She was repaid that amount of the fine that had already been paid, and her license was reinstated.

Millie Simpson’s story, as she told it to us and as we learned more about it by interviewing her employers and her attorney, illustrates the varied and contingent character of legal consciousness. Millie’s story also illustrates the power of institutionalized authority and the constraints and opportunities such authority presents for the construction of legality. In this case, and critical to its interpretation, Millie Simpson is an African American woman, supplementing her $18,000 annual income as a domestic with several part-time jobs. Her employers, the Richardses, are white. Bob Richards owns a nationwide service company that he built, and Carol Richards is an academic administrator; their combined income exceeds $350,000 a year, making them, at least with regard to income, atypical Americans. In many ways, Millie Simpson and Bob and Carol Richards represent opposite extremes of wealth and status. They represent as well the range of people whom we interviewed, a sample that approximates the racial and economic composition of the state of New Jersey.

When we first heard Millie Simpson describe her experience to us, we were struck by how she accepted the interpretations and conformed to the instructions of each of the legal actors she encountered. Although knowing she was not guilty of driving an uninsured vehicle or leaving the scene of an accident, she dutifully fulfilled the obligations imposed by the summonses, accepted her legal guilt, and immediately began taking responsibility for the penalties the court imposed, arranging to pay her fine and fulfill her community service.

Millie Simpson’s interventions during her first appearance conformed to the script offered by the court. When asked, she denied leaving the scene of the accident and explained herself to the judge.

Then, I go to court and the judge asks me do I plead guilty? I am not guilty. Then he says to me Your car without insurance? My car didn’t have any insurance on it so I said I plead guilty. So I was explaining to him what happened but he finds out that I wasn’t driving the car. . . . So then he said, after I explained it to him, he tells me, he said Okay, I can’t put down guilty because you weren’t driving the car, right? So he said I’ll put down not guilty and make another date for you to come back.

Millie Simpson assumed the judge had been persuaded by her story when he seemed to record her explanation, appointed a public defender, and set a date for a second hearing. Her intervention in this first court appearance was verbal and timely, but it was, she thought, transformed by writing and authorized into something else. She believed her account had entered and become part of the court’s institutional territory. Paper, after all, occupies space. It concretizes and makes both visible and intransigent otherwise fleeting and temporal interventions. By occupying paper, Millie Simpson believed that she could enter the realm of strategic power. Her case, as she properly understood it, was spatialized and rendered visual: recorded, filed, and placed on a docket. She believed that this physical rendering of her story would provoke the judge’s memory when he read the paper. When you go to court, she said, they remember you, you know, you haven’t been gone that long. I wasn’t gone that long, you know, a lot will remember you because they read the paper.

An outsider, inexperienced in the ways of the court, Millie Simpson assumed that her second appearance would be continuous with her first. Thus, when she returned to the court she thought there was no need to repeat herself by introducing the same details about not driving the car, and therefore not leaving the scene, that she had revealed in her first court appearance.

I didn’t tell the story because he, he had the paper there in front of him, I assumed . . . I assumed that he knew what the deal was.

In fact, rather than the continuity provided by shared interaction and memory, Millie Simpson’s interactions within the court, by being embodied by the paper in physical rather than temporal space, were transformed into two distinct and unconnected points—court appearance one and court appearance two. The rules, taxonomies, and operating procedures of the court flattened and froze time into these separate occasions. The spatialized modes of knowledge abstracted the actors from continuing interactions and arranged them in static impersonal roles, moments, and unconnected performances. The court drama—the meanings and interpretations of both the events and Millie Simpson’s legal identity—derived from impersonal standards, forms, and records, rather than the experience of repeated encounters and relationships. The human interaction that Millie believed was to be embodied in the paper was instead preempted by it.

For Millie Simpson, the spatialization of her story in the form of paper also endowed it with authority. For nine years, Millie had received written instructions from her employer. What groceries to buy, what rooms to clean, whom to pick up, all of her duties as a housekeeper were recorded daily in notes left on the kitchen table. These instructions gave shape, content, and direction to Millie’s day. Arriving every morning, she simply had to do what the paper said. The same was true, she said, for the judge who just had to read the paper and do what it said.

Upon entering the court, Millie Simpson believed in the process. She followed its rules and deferred to its procedures. Even the form of her story revealed her submissiveness and deference to the law. Millie’s accounts were presented in the form of what historians call an annal. She described events juxtaposed, statements made, even actions observed, in a world conspicuously absent human agency or will. Continuity, cause and effect are absent from her account. This is a world in which things happen to people, rather than one in which people do things. This is not, however, because Millie recognizes no moral realm, nor is it because she is oblivious to agency or causality. For Millie Simpson, the central ordering principle was so obvious, so necessary, so present as not to require articulation. For Millie, the order of things, the power of the court, the comfort and ease with which rich white folks negotiated these matters was simply there, it didn’t need to be stated.

During our interviews with Millie Simpson, she expressed skepticism for the first time when telling about her second court appearance.

Some of them probably don’t even read the paper, they just read what they need to read to find out why you are there . . . that second fudge, he acted like he didn’t know why I was even back there, you know.

Here Millie acknowledged the limits of the paper to order and organize human interaction, as well as the opportunities these limits afford for human agency. Millie entered the terrain of the court frightened and confused, she said, momentarily spotlighted by the foreign and powerful order. She hoped to exit quickly; she left, she told us, disappointed, but somewhat more experienced in the ways of the institution.

Emphasizing her conformity before the law, Millie’s tale can be read as an illustration of the power of law. She never missed nor came late to a court appearance. This is a remarkable fact since the majority of participants in lower court-processes—defendants as well as lawyers—routinely come late or miss hearings entirely. The system seemed to work as she had heard about it from friends. Before her court appearance, Millie had asked friends and neighbors about what it would be like when she got to court. They had talked about the long waits, the high bench behind which the judge sat, and how the court was filled with lots of people milling around. The defendants sat in rows in the back of the room. The police congregated in what seemed to be a special place in the court. It was a regular courtroom, she commented to us. It looked the same as courts did on TV. This was how things were supposed to be. She recognized it and went along.

But Millie Simpson did not simply stand before the law, submitting to an external and powerful authority; she also contested its findings. Millie returned to the court several weeks later, this time with an experienced attorney. Armed with the Richards family’s assistance, Millie returned to engage the court on its own terms, within the law’s terrain. Part of this challenge involved redefining and recharacterizing the persons and events Millie had related in her terms. Millie’s account of how her son’s friend had taken her car without permission was translated by her attorney into testimony before the court about an automobile theft. A misunderstanding became a crime. Millie Simpson was identified not as a mother whose house guest misunderstood her hospitality, but as a victim of crime. The fact that the public defender had shown up late for Millie’s