Preliminary Notes on Judges' Work: The Judge as a Constituent of Courtroom "Hearings"

This paper explicates the "interstructural telos" of the court (Robillard, 1974, p. 136), by focusing upon how the judge is an accountable figure in criminal court proceedings. l The paper's ethnomethodological approach requires a strict attention to the public observability of constituent activities in a courtroom hearing. A hearing is simultaneously organized as sequences of utterances and as analytic renderings of those sequences which implicate the presence and salience of specific parties in the organization of the courtroom speaking round.2