State commissions of inquiry pre-ordain solutions and operate as morality tales extending state authority

Evidence

State commissions of inquiry are curious beasts. They are both of the state and authorized by notables outside their jurisdiction, forms of inquiry whose “solutions” were often ordained and agreed upon before they were carried out. As morality tales, they powerfully sanction the limits of state responsibility as they reach into intimate and other social spaces that extend the state’s authority. As genres of documentation, they tend to employ certain writerly conventions, techniques of persuasion, and forms of evidence that combined a passion for numbers with the numbing bulk of repetition and the pathos of vignette. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 812

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s focus on colonial archive studies and how documentation genres function as technologies of rule; parallels literatures on the production of colonial knowledge. — connects to: State and local administrative agencies long preceded the federal ICC — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2535
• DEFINE: Defines what a state commission of inquiry is and how it functions as a genre of documentation.