5-Minute Hearing: Mapping the Working in Legal Technicalities in Psychiatric Involuntary Admission Cases

In this presentation, I direct my attention to the organization of judicial hearings in psychiatric involuntary admission cases and the relations that coordinate judges' and lawyers' work practices in this setting in Poland. The involuntary admission hearing is an element of external control imposed on psychiatric decisions by the Polish Mental Health Protection Act. In these hearings, admittees are predominately represented by legal aid lawyers. Drawing on my ethnographic research, I unpack organizers of involuntary admission hearings at the district court and appeal hearings at the appellate courts. I illuminate how the actualities and voices of admittees and their legal representatives are displaced by a textually coordinated legal procedure and how this displacement is made possible by legal technicalities and legal logic. While institutional ethnographies of law and legal processes typically explore the ‘outside’ of law, consistent with an IE approach to law as a social institution, the investigation of legal knowledge and the internal functioning of ‘the legal,’ for example, in the form of legal technicalities, remains intact. This presentation is an attempt to bridge the gap between IE of law and critical pluralist and socio-technical approaches to the study of law, legal processes and practices.