Ways of case-making

This book is a testament to a journey through social-scientific and judicial case-making practices. It concentrates, first, on the truths and facts sociologists have produced about legal practices. That is, it is interested in the question of how sociologists have sought to make their case about these judicial practices. It is concerned with the questions of what these social-scientific observers have seen when they cast their eyes on these practices; how they have seen what they have seen, and which realities they have enacted in their approaches.
Second, this book concentrates on the ways judges, clerks, administrative personnel and case files in a Dutch criminal court become instrumental in judicial ways of finding out ‘what really happened’ and ways of qualifying these events legally. As such this book is also an attempt to describe these judicial ways of case-making.
Third, it also aims to account for and reflect on the ways this case - the book you are holding in your hands - is made, and an attempt to work through the necessary methodological and conceptual challenges that accompany the making of such a case. Taken together, these questions produce an account of a close encounter with the ingredients of judicial case-making practices - case files, clerks, judges, courtrooms, routines, and procedures - as well as a story about sociology and the Law, knowledge and judgment, more generally.