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The Politics of Jurisdiction

“…It is through jurisdiction that ‘a life before the law is instituted, a place is subjected to rule and occupation, and an event is articulated as juridical’. This article examines the body of jurisdiction scholarship to discern how those legal lives, places and events are initiated and adjudicated. Some of this scholarship is based on technical jurisdiction in the conflicts of laws setting but most of it is firmly theoretical.…”

“…At the centre of jurisdictional practices are ‘devices, techniques, and technologies that enable the law’. Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh use the term ‘technology’ to describe the functionality of jurisdiction. They explain how ‘the technologies of jurisdiction give us the form of law’.…”

“… Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh use the term ‘technology’ to describe the functionality of jurisdiction. They explain how ‘the technologies of jurisdiction give us the form of law’. Jurisdiction as a set of technologies, in other words, brings out its materiality.…”

“…McVeigh notes that ‘insofar as there is a question of community at issue, there can be no escape from the metaphysics of sovereignty – and its accompanying institutionalisation’. Indeed, jurisdiction sheds light on the historical and conceptual formation of the political and legal domains. Postmodern critical theory has spent a lot of time in the quicksand of sovereignty and, more recently, jurisdiction.…”

“…These concern the conditions of attachment of an individual, place, or event to a legal and political order, or what Shaun McVeigh calls ‘the modes or manner of coming into law and of being with law’. In this incarnation, each jurisdictional attachment is inaugural, each instance of coming into law marks the extension of law's authority to that particular person, place, object, or event. It marks what is capable of belonging to law.…”