Vol. 4 No. 2 (February, 1994) pp. 15-16

VIRTUOUS CITIZENS, DISRUPTIVE SUBJECTS: ORDER AND COMPLAINT IN A NEW ENGLAND COURT by Barbara Yngvesson. New York: Routledge, 1993. 168 pp. Cloth $49.95. Paper $16.95.

Reviewed by MaryAnne Borrelli, Department of Government, Connecticut College.

Through a detailed comparative analysis of the hearings on applications for issuance of criminal complaints in the Essex and Franklin County courthouses of Massachusetts, Barbara Yngvesson explains how these institutions use the power of law to reinforce communal systems of inequality and control. As such, this text is appealing on several different levels. Most notably, the author tests relational theories of power, determining how persons are granted or denied political legitimacy, how their values are honored or belittled. Yngvesson then explores the factors that shape the organizational culture and dispute processing procedures of the district courthouse. The point here is not simply to alert the reader to the clerk magistrate's role as a gatekeeper; that work has already been undertaken by other analysts assessing the influence of street-level bureaucrats. Yngvesson instead uncovers the ways in which the clerk magistrate advocates a traditional socio-political order to complainants and alleged defendants describing an "emergent culture" significantly characterized by disorder. The motivations of clerks, complainants, and alleged defendants are named, the particular individuals being indicative of aggregate patterns of socio- economic change. Finally, in addition to the theoretical and institutional investigations, Yngvesson shares a series of interesting and representative case studies with the reader. These stories of criminal complaint application hearings anchor her abstractions in courthouse routines. Her historical and social profiles then detail the evolution of structures and philosophies, deepening the context of her study. Though VIRTUOUS CITIZENS, DISRUPTIVE SUBJECTS is brief, it is far from superficial.

Barbara Yngvesson is well-known for her study of the paradoxical contributions of disputing to social order; in this text, as in her earlier works, she examines how conflicts are opportunities for parties to renegotiate the distribution of power and its associated resources. Given the relational measures that drive her analysis -- quoting Anthony Giddens, Yngvesson defines power as "the capability of actors to secure outcomes where the realization of these outcomes depends upon the agency of others" [p. 47] -- this author must be knowledgeable of disputants' expectations of and responses to the court. To acquire this information, Yngvesson conducted extensive courthouse observations, surveyed docket records, and traced a number of complaint applications back through their neighborhood networks. The result is an in-depth ethnography, where the courthouse is identified as a procedural and a substantive moral statement. To prove the accuracy of this presentation, Yngvesson includes a companion study of a zoning board appeal filed in superior court; though this court, these parties, and this dispute are in complete contrast with the criminal complaint cases, Yngvesson maintains that the courthouse acts in the now- predictable mode of endorsing prevailing ("middle class") practices and values.

These words should assure the reader of the intellectual and methodological strength of Professor Yngvesson's argument. What is most valuable about this text, however, is the social comment and criticism towards which this author moves her reader. Yngvesson presents complainants and alleged defendants from a lower socio-economic status, living in "a bad neighborhood," as individuals seeking to regain some control over a life that they must constantly negotiate with social workers, welfare clerks, and various rehabilitation program directors. These disputants come to court to describe "injustice" on behalf of securing "a life free of fighting." That achievement rests on a clerk magistrate's ruling; testifying to the complainants' lack of power -- which is to say, their failure to establish a relationship with this agent -- these cases are routinely dismissed, clerk magistrates delivering "sermons" on "self- restraint" and "moderation" rather than legal remedies. And the disorder continues, the social pattern of powerlessness endures. After all, ignoring the conflict does not lessen the victimization. It does, however, transform the hurt into a wound which is

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denied healing by the law. Yngvesson emphasizes this complicity in contrasting "governance" and "judicial functions," the former being "the exercise of power by agents who ... bind' ... themselves to one another through kinship, family, and community." [p. 79] Although Yngvesson suggests that the courthouse "governs," the refusal of clerk magistrates to establish a relationship with complainants or their alleged defendants would indicate that this function is ultimately abdicated.

Even if one allows that the courthouse is governing, there is the fact that its performance alienates persons who would otherwise be among its more loyal clients. Recognition of complainants' circumstances as disorderly would oblige members of the established community to broaden their vision of societal development, but the complainants' (and, frequently, the alleged defendants') desire to experience "a life free of fighting" is one of the most entrenched elements in the traditionalists' American Creed. By denying the veracity of the complainants' and alleged defendants' reality, therefore, the courthouse clerk magistrates actually betray the value system they intend to "guard". The anger which this creates among disputants of a lower socio-economic status generates its own political claims and activism: At the conclusion of one hearing, the wife to one party, "turning at the door to spit on the floor of the courtroom," proclaimed, "This is a farce!!" [p. 95]

If the clerk magistrates are failing to perform their responsibility in "reinforcing" established values through complaint application hearings, are they nonetheless sustaining the socio-political structures of dominance? This can be assessed by the clerk magistrate's success in winnowing through the complaints, conserving the resources of higher courts by dismissing some cases, sending others to mediation, and managing those with more obvious enduring consequences. Yngvesson suggests that clerk magistrates are indeed identifying the "garbage cases," policing the border between "the vulgar" and "the professional," though these terms reveal the intimate relationship between the clerk magistrates' organizational role and communal mission. Still, the gestures and remarks of the woman described above are directed at the court as a political structure, not at theories of right and obligation. In brief, the clerk magistrates' failure to defend the values of the community calls into question the legitimacy of communal-judicial institutions. In regards to criminal complainants and their alleged defendants, this courthouse failure teaches disdain for the law and thus denies the character of the law as a border between duty and aspiration.

Yngvesson maintains that clerk magistrates wield their power by denying lower socio-economic status disputants the opportunity to enter into a relationship with the courthouse -- relegating these persons to the no-win circumstances of "disruptive subjects" -- and by refusing their desired outcome of a peaceable existence. And yet those excluded from the courthouse can not routinely be ignored. Their violence threatens persons beyond their immediate relations, and their pain inevitably prompts a re-assessment of domination if not of oppression. Though both may live in the present, Yngvesson presents the so-called virtuous citizen as imaging a mythic past while the disruptive subject copes with a harsh future. It is that future which we all must confront, if there is to be "a life free of fighting" for any one of us.


Copyright 1994