Craft skills and legal rules: How Australian magistrates make bail decisions

This paper pursues an ethnomethodological approach in describing the work of magistrates making bail decisions in Australian lower courts. Because researchers are committed to examining the practical nature of occupational work, this approach has potential to provide a detailed account of rule-use in legal settings. It will be shown how magistrates employ and are permitted to employ considerable discretion when working within bail legislation, and in interpreting legislation. This account of legal work is relevant to long-standing debates about rule skepticism and formalism; and to policy debates that seek to limit judicial discretion.