Seeing the Case Clearly: File‐Work,Material Mediation,and Visualizing Practices in a Dutch Criminal Court

In Dutch criminal courts, judges and their assisting clerks spend significant amounts of time doing file‐work in preparation for the court hearing: a practice they often call “visualizing the case.” This practice is distributed over clerks and judges and materially mediated: the legal case file enters into face‐to‐file interaction as both a text and a material object. This article aims to unpack what techniques clerks and judges draw on in order to come to “see the case clearly,” while at the same time it elaborates on the renegotiations of these largely paper‐based practices when court workers are confronted with the digitization of case files.