Apologies for the late notice about this very exciting (proposed) session:
Call for Papers for Proposed Session:
"How
Law Sorts its World: Classification and Categories in the Making of
Jurisdictions"
This panel will
examine technical forms of differentiation, classification, and sorting that
situate people and phenomena in relation to different bodies of law. Its
central concern is the ways in which such distinctions shape boundaries of
jurisdiction by establishing categories of subjects and objects suitable to -
or, alternatively, outside of - law’s reach. As Bradin Cormack (2007) explains,
to consider jurisdiction implies “an abstraction upward from a sphere of
substantive law” in which “the latter confronts, in practice, the question of
its competence over a given case.” Panelists will explore the criteria, actors,
and forms of knowledge that their own research finds creating and reinforcing
the distinctions that resolve such questions of competence. The panel may also
consider how jurisdiction carries embedded categories which validate and further
entrench modes of classification and/or make them transferrable across legal and
regulatory domains. Of particular interest will be the ways in which not only
spatial, but also temporal and conceptual boundaries become factors determining
the application or non-applicability of law.
Practices of classification and sorting often
go unscrutinized in studies of the law (Bowker and Star 1999). This is usually
due to a certain invisibility that accompanies the apparent obviousness of
their products: neatly delineated subjects and objects assumed to be already
settled prior to any legal intervention. This panel widens the lens on
what constitutes “legal classification” by considering technical classificatory
work on basis of its legal effects. Mariana Valverde (2009) and others have
called for greater attention to how such “technicalities” authorize
and determine the paths of law. By calling attention to how categories
and classificatory schemes function as legal, this panel seeks to contribute
to broader empirical and theoretical efforts to demystify
law’s authority.
This panel seeks careful analyses from diverse sites of how law sorts its world: persons and things, contexts and events, concepts and kinds, facts and fabrications. It is concerned less with judgments about what is legal or illegal than modes of determining what is “inside of,” or “belongs to,” which legal or regulatory domain. Papers may explore the following issues, among others:
- the qualities or criteria used to designate particular subjects or objects in relation to systems of legality
- the interplay of spatial, temporal, and conceptual aspects of jurisdictional categories or modes of classification
- disjunctions or transferences of categories across different court systems, national and international legal bodies, or civil and criminal procedures
- implications of the situational or inconsistent application of a category or classificatory scheme
- the limit points and cusps of categories and distinctions
- disagreements about ontological kind in jurisdiction-making
- the knowledges enlisted to define or undo boundaries of jurisdiction, or to settle ambiguities between them
- the role of the scalar definition of a legal phenomenon in effecting categories of subject, object, or relation
Paper proposals with an abstract of no more than 250 words should be sent to Josh Clark (clarkj1@uci.edu) and Sean Mallin (smallin@uci.edu) no later than Tuesday, October 8.
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