The Boundaries of Objectivity: How Professional Judges Construct Legitimate Knowledge in Relation to Lay Judges in Swedish Administrative Courts

This study explores what kind of epistemologies and knowledge claims that are perceived as legitimate within Swedish administrative courts. The judicial culture in Sweden is characterized by a strong commitment to rationality and detachment, hence, it is important for professional judges to keep themselves and their decision-making untouched by anything that resembles subjectivity and emotions. However, professional judges need to cooperate with and make decisions together with lay judges on a daily basis. In Sweden, lay judges are assigned by political parties and they can, under certain circumstances, overrule the professional judges, which make their non-judicial opinions and knowledge claims potentially influential. Consequently, professional judges use a variety of different informal techniques to control lay judges, among others, they set boundaries between objective and subjective forms of knowledge and experiences. Through interviews with both lay judges and professional judges, combined with and observations of interactions between judges and lay judges in court hearings, I analyze how professional judges exercise authority over them and how lay judges make sense of (and sometimes resist) this authority. One of the main conclusions is that professional judges perceive lay judges with similar ethnicity and experiences as the professional judges to possess objective knowledge, while lay judges with experiences of migrating to Sweden or of belonging to an ethnic or cultural minority group are perceived as subjective and, hence, as non-judicial. This study thereby contributes to critical race studies of law and legal practices by exploring how experiences of whiteness are tied to objectivity in the judicial sphere. The practical and societal implications of these findings are that racialized bodies, knowledges and experiences are delegitimized in the name of objectivity and judicial independence.