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This chapter begins with a discussion of the court system in the late Roman Empire. It then discusses lower-level judicial hearings and their interaction with the higher courts, training for magistrates, and the iudex as a ‘creative’ interpreter of law.

This chapter examines how litigants experience Russia's justice-of-the-peace courts (JP courts). The views of judges are unlikely to mirror those of litigants. For judges, the judicial process represents routine behavior, whereas for most litigants, it opens a Pandora's box of formal rules and informal norms that are unfamiliar and mysterious. This is particularly true for the JP courts, which handle the simplest cases. The chapter first provides an overview of access to justice in Russia before turning to legal literacy, and especially how Russians negotiate the JP courts without a lawyer. It then considers the availability and use of legal expertise by Russians, along with litigants' participation in judicial hearings as performance and their satisfaction with the JP courts. It also describes the image of JP courts and suggests that litigants' willingness to turn to the courts provides a window into the demand for law and, more generally, Russian legal culture.

This chapter traces Justice Antonin Scalia’s rise from law school to a position on the Supreme Court and then his emergence as a judicial icon representing “conservatism” and “originalism” in opposition to the legacy of the Warren Court. It locates his rise in his political commitment to the Republican Party, his appeal to President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese III, and his triumph over his fellow conservative intellectual Robert Bork for the leadership of judicial conservatism and the effort to promote constitutional originalism. Once established on the Court, Scalia’s influence grew until he and his jurisprudence became significant political issues for both national parties, especially in subsequent judicial confirmation hearings and presidential elections. When Scalia died in early 2016, his replacement became a major issue in the presidential campaign, and the new Trump administration promised to replace him with the most Scalia-like candidate it could find.

The chapter explains identity and identity-work and argues why it is central to the study of law-making and law-interpreting. Then it gives a brief history of gay rights in the United States, focusing particular attention on the issue of same-sex marriage. An overview of the supreme court oral arguments, the judicial committee hearings, and the additional materials that are used to develop the argument about identity-work and social change are described; the claim about the morality of a category of person carried an internal explosive device that detonated when the context changed. In subsequent sections the particular discourse analytic approach taken is described and upcoming chapters are previewed.

This chapter analyzes the stories told in the New Jersey and Colorado Judicial Committee hearings, the first and last hearings in this book’s time frame. Narratives told by speakers favoring marriage rights are analyzed, as it was these speakers who told stories most often. After an overview of narratives in the two hearings, three arguments that pro-speakers’ stories advanced regarding why social change was needed are described. In the chapter’s second section, one story from a con-speaker and the countering narrative “question” it elicited are explored. The chapter concludes by identifying a coda that was repeatedly articulated in the Colorado hearing that was absent from the earlier New Jersey one. This coda, which explicitly appealed to legislators to be on the “right side of history,” furthered social change, and was an explicit sign that a major change in societal opinion had happened in the time between the two hearings.