Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace and the ethnography of trials

Speaker: Oscar Parra Vera, Judge at the Special Jurisdiction for Peace in Colombia.

Panelists: Sharon Weill, Professor at the American University of Paris, and Sofía Cabarcas Maciá, PhD Candidate at Sciences Po Law School.

Ethnography, a social science method, has been increasingly applied in legal scenarios, one that seems especially visible: the ethnography of trials. Sitting in a courtroom and following a legal procedure from its beginning to its end becomes the centre of many socio-legal studies and the opportunity to question the legal field’s limits and potentialities. Additionally, trials have been the subject of studies on performativity and theatricality.

A parallel between the courtroom and theatre has been the epicentre of multiple questions on the legality of procedure, the result of a legal process, and in criminal law, the various tensions between different justice principles such as due process of the prosecuted and victims’ rights. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace in Colombia has been developing public criminal hearings since 2022 and has become a new site of multiple academic ethnographies.

This conference looks to dive into Magistrate Oscar Parra Vera’s experience leading public hearings and being subject to multiple academic studies in real time, and contrast this with the findings and analysis of Professor Sharon Weill and Sofía Cabarcas Macia, who have been participant observers at Magistrate Parra’s courtroom. The discussion looks to dive into the legal field’s debate on the use of social sciences methods and the insight that the intersection between ethnography and law and the approach of law as performance can bring to the concept of law.