The carpenter and the wood

the constitution of legal data from an ethnomethodological perspective

Abstract

This article proposes to report a research experience with complex corpora, on the aim of sharing the backstage of elaborating a database instituted mainly for doctoral research, undertaken at the Université Lumière Lyon II/France, in the ICAR laboratory, whose specialty is precisely work with corpora analysis at different levels of extension and complexity. From an ethnomethodological perspective (MONDADA, 2008; OCHS, SCHEGLOFF, THOMPSON, 1996; SCHEGLOFF, 1999; TRAVERS, 2001; TRAVERSO, 2007), in an immersion in legal territory (CORNU, 2005; DUPRET, 2006; LATOUR, 2004) , the research reported here sought to describe and analyze how magistrates manage disagreement, in situations that are often eristic. Without distancing ourselves from theoretical studies about the precepts of methodology of academic works in general (GIL, 2002; MOTTA-ROTH; HENDGES, 2010; SALOMON, 2014), we formed a database based on the notion of argumentative situation, a rhetorical notion retaken up by Plantin (1993, 1995, 1996, 2016), which highlights situations of conflict of opinion, in various argumentative contexts. From the exhaustive and intricate double transcription of the data (BAUDE, 2006; BLANCHE-BENVENISTE, 2008; KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI, 2006). The research culminated in the confirmation that the legal discourse is far from being cold and aseptic and that argumentative interactions in that context, if analyzed in the heat of deliberations, have much to teach us about arguing in an institutional context. This can be seen in four analytical chapters whose planning and execution now we bring to light, from the study of law in action, that is, in a concrete situation, from the deliberations of magistrates in moral damages cases, in a Brazilian court of Second Instance.