The Judiciary and the Boundaries of Street Level Bureaucracy: Family Judges in France and Canada

This paper analyses the relevance of public administration concepts to study judicial policy-making at the grass-roots. Three characteristics of street-level bureaucracy are challenging: judges belong to the upper class; their “independence” is formally recognized; they are legitimate interpreters of law. However, this approach may be useful to study their political role, as they work front-line and their jurisdiction may interfere with the one of “regular” street-level bureaucrats (social workers). As judges may be considered as borderline, it is relevant to compare how different jurisdictions deal with this frontier. Based on the ethnography of two family justice systems (observation of 500 court proceedings, interviews with 40 judges and the study of 140 court records), the paper shows that French judges’ roles are much closer from street-level bureaucracy than their Canadian counterparts. It also accounts for the reasons of such differences: legal traditions, litigation proceedings, social and gender patterns in the judiciary.