Innovation, routinisation et gestionde l'imprévu dans les audiencespar visioconférence: Comment un écran et une caméra sur un meubleà roulettes travaillent l'organisation judiciaireen France

This article deals with judicial preliminary hearings involving remote participants connected through a video link. The defendant appears before the court (the examining chamber) from the prison where he or she is in detention. Studying this case, the paper explores the way videoconferencing challenges justice in many ways : as an organization, as a range of institutions and as a legal construction. The authors analyze how judges, the public prosecutor and lawyers try to manage this situation by imagining new ways of organizing and practicing remote hearings. They produce local rules and settings along the way. As a consequence, it can be said that videoconferencing in court hearings is now becoming a routine. However, this routine is fragile because of the vulnerability and risks of technology. An unexpected breakdown occurring during a court prehearing enables us to point out what judicial actors can collectively do to manage and fix out the activity they were accomplishing. At the crossroads between sociology of law and sociology of work, this article is mostly based on a video recorded corpus of French court hearings.