Consider that when a court transforms the moment of discrimination or legal harm to a recognizable fact, it impinges on the ability of the subject to speak of that fact as it or It must, rather, be spoken through the often challenging was in h/er own terms. language of law. In short, h/er experience is made textual, but not in the text s/he wrote. Even if the judge allows a claimaint to speak on h/er own behalf, on the stand as it were, h/er experiences must be read finely through the allowed discourses of the court. Evidence is rendered out through motions and processes long before s/he reaches the stand. H/er story is inscribed on documents that have been reviewed and revised, read and re-read by various actors. H/er story is not h/er own, yet to the court it very much is; it is a direct line to reality. The extent to which self-reflexivity as a norm would permeate the gateway to the judiciary is at best questionable. It is only the epistemic input on the part of the claimant, in h/er own terms, and without the translation rendered by legal semantics, that can guarantee some adherence to a standard of epistemic justice just described. And thus we have the indeterminacy of what is translated as accepted fact within the epistemological domain of law and what is fact as it was on the ground, for the claimant, and for the lives of those who will continue after the judgment of this translated fact is rendered. Indeed, the courts must dispense with uncertainty, and replace the merely epistemic doubt in their translation of a lived moment as mere philosophical artifice. are dealing with the facts.” But how these facts are construed, and under “We what prism the courts actively choose to view these facts through (be it precedent, argument, brief, or motion) are never admitted to simply alter them. It is indeed a ‘social construction’ thinking itself as dispassionate objectivity, of real human being in a text’s
Consider that when a court transforms the moment of discrimination or legal harm to a recognizable fact, it impinges on the ability of the subject to speak of that fact as it was or in h/er own terms. It must, rather, be spoken through the often challenging language of law. In short, h/er experience is made textual, but not in the text s/he wrote. Even if the judge allows a claimaint to speak on h/er own behalf, on the stand as it were, h/er experiences must be read finely through the allowed discourses of the court. Evidence is rendered out through motions and processes long before s/he reaches the stand. H/er story is inscribed on documents that have been reviewed and revised, read and re-read by various actors. H/er story is not h/er own, yet to the court it very much is; it is a direct line to reality. The extent to which self-reflexivity as a norm would permeate the gateway to the judiciary is at best questionable. It is only the epistemic input on the part of the claimant, in h/er own terms, and without the translation rendered by legal semantics, that can guarantee some adherence to a standard of epistemic justice just described. And thus we have the indeterminacy of what is translated as accepted fact within the epistemological domain of law and what is fact as it was on the ground, for the claimant, and for the lives of those who will continue after the judgment of this translated fact is rendered. Indeed, the courts must dispense with uncertainty, and replace the merely epistemic doubt in their translation of a lived moment as mere philosophical artifice. “We are dealing with the facts.” But how these facts are construed, and under what prism the courts actively choose to view these facts through (be it precedent, argument, brief, or motion) are never admitted to simply alter them. It is indeed a ‘social construction’ thinking itself as dispassionate objectivity, of real human being in a text’s