There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully-fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non-attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law's omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practised. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.

This article examines how a politics of speed is manifest in a legal context via a detailed ethnography of the French National Court of Asylum (CNDA). It identifies the temporal, spatial, and organizational ordering techniques that characterize asylum appeals in France and discusses the consequences of these techniques for the way in which the appeal process is experienced by legal decision makers and subjects. It reveals adverse impacts of legal quickening on legal quality, in particular through identifying: ‘cracks’ in the performance of legal roles like lawyer and judge that begin to appear when law is executed rapidly and repetitively; dwindling opportunities to demonstrate and experience respect between parties; and the ‘thinning‐out’ of legal process, as heuristics rather than deliberation come to dominate legal reasoning. The article contributes to a burgeoning body of socio‐legal literature on law and time by establishing the negative impact of excessive legal quickening on role performance, respect, and legal quality.

This chapter explores the complex nature of refugee determination through the experiences and work of lawyers in asylum appeals at the UK First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber). It highlights the dilemma whereby asylum appeals are generally anticipated to be determined within a system of legal norms, whereas what is frequently encountered is the exclusionary politics of immigration control. Key to analysis here is an exploration of the significance of relationships and communication between tribunal actors situated in multiple, intersecting social fields. By looking at professional backgrounds, personal relationships and organisational dynamics, we gain a sense of how legal values of fairness and justice in refugee determination procedures are so often subsumed by political, administrative and economic concerns to control migration.

The paper compares European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and uk court judgments on cross-border nationality cases concerning children and wholly domestic family law cases regarding children (without the cross-border element). It identifies different legal standards that apply to the well-being of children such as the best interests principle and the welfare principle and maps how successful these standards are in bringing in the views of children. It appears that cross-border nationality cases are unable to consider the interests of children as seriously as the wholly domestic family law cases. The domestic court approach of welfare brings in children’s views more effectively than nationality cases in domestic courts or at the ECtHR. It would benefit children if a rigorous best interests determination is carried out in nationality proceedings and a welfare approach is adopted consistent with family law cases.