Abstract
This research is situated in the legal context of contentious jurisdiction in Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By exploring the transcription of court proceedings (Gerichtsprotokolle), the article addresses the relationship between orality and literacy. Research on the production and use of court records shows that these two modes of communication were co-constitutive; the written word had to be retranslated into the spoken word in order to effect the agency of written artefacts as legal documents. The article reflects on the performativity of writing and the legal status of shorthand as part of rationalisation and modernisation of legal procedure, and deals with the obstacles which orality posed to literacy in the simultaneous acts of speaking, listening, and writing.
