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.