Most sociolegal research on juries and other forms of lay participation in criminal justice has been limited to questions of how lay people make decisions. This article proposes expanding this focus through a conceptually and methodologically novel examination of the recent incorporation of lay decision-makers in Argentina’s criminal justice system. Based on fieldwork conducted in the province of Córdoba, the article follows jurors as they enter the courthouses, unsettle normalized everyday practices and spatiotemporal arrangements, and encounter multiple authorities that define their role and legitimate belonging therein. The work of these multiple entities, the article argues, locates jurors in ambiguous situations between public and private spaces of the courthouses, and ultimately accentuate their alterity vis-à-vis legal professionals. Drawing on an ethnographic approach inspired in actor-network theory and on Mariana Valverde’s sociolegal elaborations of Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope, the article looks at this judicial reform as a site for fruitful examination of law’s multiscalar power dynamics, and it argues that legal institutions be investigated as flexible, fragile, and contingent assemblages of practices beyond their official representations.

关于陪审团和其他形式的非专业人士参与刑事司法的大多数社会法律研究仅限于非专业人士如何做出决定的问题。本文建议通过在概念和方法上新颖的研究来扩展这种关注，该研究是对最近将非专业决策者纳入阿根廷刑事司法系统中的。基于在科尔多瓦省进行的实地调查，文章追踪了陪审员进入法院，扰乱规范化的日常实践和时空安排，并遇到了多个界定其角色和合法归属的权威。文章认为，这多个实体的工作使陪审员处于法院公共场所和私人场所之间模棱两可的状况，最终加剧了他们与法律专业人士之间的差异。时空体，文章看起来在这个司法改革作为法律的多尺度的权力动态卓有成效的检查一个网站，它认为，法律机构进行调查研究的超出了他们的官方代表的做法灵活，脆弱，队伍组合。