Analysis of Case Law
Courts have a decisive influence not only on the lives of those involved in a specific legal dispute, but also on how legal norms designed to combat racism are interpreted. At the same time, many people experience racism in court themselves or are otherwise inadequately protected by the law. The analysis of case law highlights the current state of legally relevant understandings of racism and subjects them to critical scrutiny.
Legal reasoning follows its own set of rules, which are often difficult for laypeople to grasp and understand. Initially, the reconstruction must also adhere to these rules in order to grasp the arguments within their own legal logic. However, in order not merely to reflect the status quo but also to critique it, a critical analysis of the law is necessary, as is a combination with other methods used in NaDiRa.
An analysis that considers only the perspective inherent in the law may be compatible with legal discourse, but it often fails to capture the lived reality of people who are confronted with the law and the justice system or who turn to the legal system with their specific problems in order to obtain justice. For this reason, it is important not to treat the analysis of case law in isolation, but to combine it with other methods and perspectives. To this end, the analysis of case law in NaDiRa is closely integrated with the findings from document analysis and interviews regarding the work of the counseling centers.