ABSTRACT
Focusing on judiciary conciliation hearings in Belgian family justice, this chapter reflects on the everyday routines and tasks of Family Court judges and respecifies the historical transformations Belgian positive law has undergone, during the last decades, on its road toward the definition of an egalitarian model of parental and conjugal relationships. The chapter highlights the impacts of these (historically speaking) new rules for conjugal and parental relationships on the performances of the daily and ordinary tasks of Family Court judges at a double level: their emotional and practical meanings in action and in context. It shows that consent judgements based on these rules are more likely to be reached with reciprocal claims which do not support radical changes in modalities already in place and with parents which can adapt their emotional status to the indications of the judges and therefore perform mastery and self-control. Regarding the emotional meanings attached to the tasks undertaken by the judges in charge of conciliatory hearings, the chapter underlines two main attitudes: pedagogical engagements with emotional display versus a more classic and authoritative style of distancing. However, these differences in styles appear not to determine the judges’ capacity to persuade parents to enter into (total or partial) agreements. Regarding the practical grammar of the rules, the chapter identifies their temporal and spatial dimensions as key operators of the everyday tasks when judges are reaching (or not) an agreement through a consent judgement. At the practical level of operation, the instructive nature of legal rules in this conciliatory space tends to assure the already well documented “conservative” function of legal operations, as they momentarily freeze time and enunciate self-made rules of parenting.
