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