4 - Justices of the Peace at Accusatory Theatres

Summary

More directly focused on the internal scripts for performances at these theatres, the fourth Chapter describes how colonial criminal accusation worked through arrayed chambers; laying information, arrest, and summary trials or preliminary examination. It highlights the pretrial work of oft-overlooked leading actors in law enforcement – senior police officers serving ex officio as justices of the peace. Descending from age-old British legal institutions, the colonial justice of the peace migrated to eastern Canada and then to pretrial arenas in the North-West Territories. By way of paradigmatic examples, the chapter shows how police and justices arranged – relying on legal scripts – theatres where performances of criminal accusation could be staged. The examples suggest that without accusatory theatres, colonial criminalization could not have appeared let alone presented itself as superior to other legal fields. Accusatory foundations were thus performatively implicated at the heart of colonial law’s attempts to manage dispossessing settler orders via criminalization.