Death, discourse and human rights: The construction of controversial deaths in the coroner's court

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This research will explore how legal discourse operates to shape accounts of controversial deaths as they are recounted in the coroner's court. Through ethnographic research it will seek to examine whether the coronial narrative decontextualizes death by reformulating and reinterpreting it, utilising the discourse of human rights to foreground certain factors whilst obscuring others.Informed by debates around the 'juridification' of human rights (Brown and Halley, 2002), this study will investigate the influence of law in "privatising" human rights discourse through the introduction of specialized language, images and concepts (Evans, 2005: 1050). Drawing on the concept of 'legal consciousness' (Merry, 1990; Ewick & Sibley, 1998), it is proposed that these specialized 'interpretative schemas' appropriate the legitimacy ascribed to law to situate its application in the coronial context as just, rational and inevitable. Interpretative schema also comprise an ideological framework made up of what Hochschild (1979) calls 'framing rules' and 'feeling rules' which regulate the generation, expression and management of emotions. Through casting emotion as 'other' to the reason and rationality of law, this framework performs a regulatory function in the coroner's court.Whilst there exists a wealth of theoretical literature on human rights, there is 'relatively little sociological research on how human rights law works in practice' (Merry, 2006: 977). This weakness has been remedied somewhat by the 'ethnographic turn' in human rights scholarship since the late 1990s (Cowan, Dembour and Wilson, 2006; Wilson, 2006; Goodale, 2006). However it remains the case that the capaciousness of rights claims requires any assessment of the possibilities and limitations of human rights be rooted in empirical, contextual and grounded inquiry into "the social life of rights" (Wilson, 2006; Grewal, 2014:3), how people in particular milieus interpret and interact with human rights.In spite of its centrality in generating official accounts of controversial deaths, the coroner's court has largely been overlooked "as a site of justice and injustice" (Scott Bray and Martin, 2016). The ways in which actors in the coroner's court - family members, lawyers and coroners - interpret and interact with human rights discourse has received scant scholarly attention with some suggesting it is long overdue (Baker, 2016; McLaughlin, 2007; Beckett, 1999).It is hoped that this research will be of interest to legal professionals, sociologists and socio-legal scholars. It is also hoped that this study will also be relevant to policy makers interested in participatory institutional design.