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Grounded in legal ethnomethodology, this book explores terrorism trials in France. Drawing on extensive court ethnography, a multidisciplinary research team examines how terrorism logics are reflected, represented, and negotiated within criminal proceedings. Based on hundreds of hearing days - ranging from small terrorism criminal cases to the so-called trials for history, commonly known as the 'Charlie Hebdo' and the 'Bataclan' trials - this study offers a nuanced, bottom-up perspective on the role of courts. Through courtroom immersion, close observation of legal performances, and interviews with judicial actors, it investigates how justice is shaped in practice. Identifying three generations of trials, the book provides original insights into the evolving role of courts in terrorism cases. From an empirical and comparative perspective, it also seeks to make criminal trials more accessible to Anglophone readers, offering a deeper understanding of how terrorism is prosecuted in France, highlighting the role of judges, prosecutors, lawyers and victims.
List of contents
Introduction: from the laboratory of the lower courts the Bataclan show trial: three generations of terror trials; 1. Courtroom scenes and methodology; 2. The trial actors: 'In the name of the French people'; 3. The laboratory of the 16th chamber: designing the architecture and experimenting the policy; 4. The second generation of Jihadist trials: the slow justice of the French assize court (2017-2019); 5. The 'trials for history': a new paradigm for the prosecution of mass crimes?; 6. Final reflections.
About the author
Sharon Weill is Professor of International Law at the American University of Paris and a research associate at La Sorbonne University (PhD, Geneva University). Her research focuses on the relations between armed conflicts, political violence, and the role of courts, using socio-legal approaches including trial ethnography. She is the author of The Role of National Courts in Applying International Humanitarian Law (2014) and the President on Trial: Prosecuting Hissène Habré (co-edited, 2020). She has been directing several research programmes focusing on the role of national courts as transnational actors, financed in part by the French Ministry of Justice.Denis Salas is an author, magistrate and holds a PhD in Public Law and the Sociology of Law (University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne). Since 2016, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of Les Cahiers de la Justice (peer-reviewed journal of the French National School of Magistrates). He has published more than a hundred articles and over a dozen books.Antoine Mégie (PhD, Sciences Po Paris) is an associate professor at the University of Rouen in France, and head of the Political Sciences department. Former Director of the journal Politique européenne, he is a member of the editorial board of the journal Cultures et Conflits.His research focuses on the role of law in the 'fight against terrorism'. In addition to coordinating several European and transatlantic programmes on the fight against terrorism, from 2017 he has been co-director of several research programmes funded by the Ministry of Justice on terror trials.Christiane Besnier, an anthropologist and research associate at the Center for Cultural Anthropology at the University of Paris Sorbonne, has been working on criminal courts in France and Europe since 2002. She is the author of La vérité côté cour – Une ethnologue aux assises (2017).
