“Please Check the Appropriate Box”: Documents and the Governance of Domestic Violence

This analysis examines the effects of administrative templates on legal responses to domestic violence. The discussion focuses on a set of intake forms deployed by a team of grassroots workers who routinely attend Toronto's specialized domestic violence plea courts to enroll defendants into counseling programs. Although these documents are nothing more than mundane, administrative forms, they are crucial to generating the formations required to govern domestic violence through the criminal justice and community partnerships on which the plea courts rely. Along with redefining the responsibilities of the legal and grassroots actors involved in the court network, the documents also generate and formalize notions of wrongdoing that prove to be far more effective in resolving cases than traditional guilty pleas. This analysis illuminates how forms permit the retreat and reassertion of state sovereignty as required in legal regimes involving devolution. It also underscores the methodological importance of constitutive analyses of documents to illuminating machinations of penal power.