Matthew Clair

The Court Listening Project is a research study and archive that examines how system-impacted people understand, engage with, and seek to transform the legal system in the Bay Area, CA. Over the next year, the project will focus on three courthouses in Santa Clara County: the Palo Alto Courthouse, the Hall of Justice (San Jose), and the Downtown Superior Court (San Jose). At each courthouse, a diverse team of researchers will be collecting interviews, ethnographic observations, and photographs among defendants, victims, witnesses, jurors, lawyers, and people who live or work nearby. With these data, researchers will answer the following questions: How do system-impacted people understand and envision changing the courts in the Bay Area? How and why might their visions for change vary by social position (e.g., race, class, gender, or relationship to the courthouse)? How does race and racism shape individual and community understandings of justice in the Bay Area? As part of the project’s commitment to the communities under study, interim reports and excerpts from the project’s data collection efforts will be made publicly available on the project’s website: www.courtlisteningproject.org.