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Introduction: What Does It Matter Who One Is?

Introducing the first number of “On the Case,” I described the case as an event that takes place in a variety of institutional, disciplinary, and ordinary-life contexts that are shaped by the practice or expression of expertise. Typically, the instance that becomes a case of x is an event that verifies something in a system: a symptom is named, an occurrence is adjudicated, or a cluster of activities or objects are reframed, solidified, and transformed through explanation.Whether uttered in a professionalorvernacular idiom, this explanation both communicates something about the object or scene about which a case has been made and confirms the authority of the decider. Usually, then, cases are not very interesting, and deciders do not want them to be. They want cases to be like any encounter one might have in a day,which canbe processed andfiledwith almostnomemory.The“almost” is important, though, because the appearance of smooth processing of a new case verifies a system or expert’s durable legitimacy. Even when important variations within a norm are established by new phenomena, a system or way of thinking can only endure if it figures out a way to—at least—seem to absorb the case into its core practices, while perhaps acknowledging development or reform. The concept of the “state of exception,” to which many essays in number one pointed—especially those of Nasser Hussain, Peter Goodrich, Diana Taylor, and Jessica Dubow—is a great example of a normative elaboration within a system that can look external to it threateningly without being such. This is to say that the event of potential substitution is a crucial phase in the development of case logics. If we were dramatic, we could say that any