ABSTRACT
By analysing the progress of some cases recently observed in the Metropolitan Magistrates' Courts, this chapter sets out to enunciate some of the elements of social control as it is practised in the lower courts. It talks about the magistrates' courts and describes how legal and extra-legal rules can be systematically and routinely orchestrated to accomplish competent performances of justice. Professional monopoly of the strategic rules which mediate between the constitutive and regulative rules of courtroom interaction puts all defendants at a disadvantage. Their resultant tension, anxiety and despair is manifested in verbal and non-verbal forms. Such expressions of tension, anxiety and despair not only detract from the performances of defendants, they also appear to confirm and legitimate the assumptions implicit in the classificatory frames: that a defendant in a magistrates' court is, by definition, an incompetent member of society.
