Innovation, Routinization, and Improvisation in the Context of a Judicial Inquiry by Videoconference

This paper examines preliminary judicial hearings involving remote participants connected through a video link. The defendant appears before the court (the examining chamber) from the prison where he/she is being held. This paper explores the many challenges videoconferencing presents to the justice system—organizational, institutional, and legal. This paper analyzes how judges, public prosecutors, and lawyers try to manage this situation by imagining new ways of organizing and practicing remote hearings. They produce local rules and settings along the way. Nowadays, videoconferencing in court hearings is becoming routine. However, this routine is fragile due to the vulnerability and risks of the technology. This paper cites the case of an unexpected breakdown of the technology during a hearing in order to show what judicial actors can collectively do to manage and fix the problem. At the crossroads between the sociology of law and the sociology of work, this paper is primarily based on a corpus of video recordings of hearings in French courts.