Are Rights Out of Time? International Human Rights Law, Temporality, and Radical Social Change

McNeilly, Kathryn

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3279345

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…How do we make sense of the connection between law and time? Scholars have suggested that the law serves to construct ideas of time (McNeilly, 2018) and sustains competing temporalities: it is both certain through its enactment at a specific point in time and uncertain due to the potential of reversibility (McNeilly, 2018, p. 4). Despite its ability to hold plural histories and futures, the legal system is largely stagnant and backward gazing where discourses of gender and sexuality are concerned.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Injustice and Judicial Discourse on Transgender Rights in India: Uncovering Temporal Pluralism

Jain

Rhoten

2020

Journal of Human Values

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This article examines how efforts at legal legibility acquisition by gender diverse litigants result in problematic (e.g., narratives counter to self-identity) and, at times, erroneous discourses on sex and gender that homogenize the litigants themselves. When gender diverse persons approach the court with a rights claim, the narrative they present must necessarily limit itself to a normative discourse that the court may understand and, therefore, engage with. Consequently, the everyday lived experiences of gender diverse persons are often deliberately erased from the narrative as litigants mould themselves into the pre-existing normative legal categories of gender and sex. As a result of such mechanisms, the article finds that gender diverse litigants face epistemic injustice in the courts as their legal legibility is constructed within a constraining gender binary paradigm of judicial discourse. The article explores the trajectory of transgender rights in India, through an analysis of case law prior to and post the landmark NALSA decision, to understand how the approach to transgender rights and identities has been shaped by and shapes, in turn, normative conceptions of gender. The article argues for the incorporation of temporal pluralism into the law that would allow courts to hear gender diverse litigant accounts premised on contemporary gender diversity beyond the binary (rather than incontestable prior understandings based in past precedent), which would better account for such social injustices.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Injustice and Judicial Discourse on Transgender Rights in India: Uncovering Temporal Pluralism

Jain

Rhoten

2020

Journal of Human Values

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“…In paying empirical attention to the relation between legal practices of sorting time and the definition of violence, we can understand how the court closes off routes to alternative futures, thereby sustaining forms of structural violence. Nevertheless, law has the opportunity to sort and include temporality in a different way, leaving space for alternative ways of knowing or predicting the future (McNeilly, 2019). This subsection has therefore emphasized what is at stake in terrorism-financing proceedings, highlighting how empirical accounts of time can offer forms of legal resistance that create space for the inclusion of multiple pasts, presents and futures (McNeilly, 2019).…”

Section: What Counts As Violence?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, law has the opportunity to sort and include temporality in a different way, leaving space for alternative ways of knowing or predicting the future (McNeilly, 2019). This subsection has therefore emphasized what is at stake in terrorism-financing proceedings, highlighting how empirical accounts of time can offer forms of legal resistance that create space for the inclusion of multiple pasts, presents and futures (McNeilly, 2019).…”

Section: What Counts As Violence?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Time will tell: Defining violence in terrorism court cases

Anwar

2021

Security Dialogue

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Calculating the potential risk of future terrorist violence is at the core of counter-terrorism practices. Particularly in court cases, this potential risk serves as legitimization for the preemptive criminalization of suspicious (financial) behaviour. This article argues that the preemptive temporality seen in such court cases is a practice of ‘sorting time’ and producing distinct legal definitions around future violence. Building on postcolonial and feminist scholarship on temporality, the article examines preemptive temporality as the material, embodied and multiple engagements with time that are enacted in terrorism court cases. Through the use of empirical data obtained from court observations, court judgements and interviews with legal practitioners, accounts of empirical temporalities are traced to illuminate other forms of violence that until now have been overshadowed by the dominant (and relatively unchallenged) perception of future terrorist threats that is enacted in the courtroom. In this way, the article makes two important contributions. First, it advances the theoretical debate on preemptive security through an examination of how legal and security practices co-produce temporality by defining future terrorist violence. Second, it contributes empirically by showing how temporality is constructed in multiple ways, paying specific attention to temporalities resisting dominating perceptions of future terrorist violence.

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“…Time, Temporality and Legal Judgment is the most recent contribution to what its author Tanzil Chowdhury describes as the 'nascent "temporal turn" in socio-legal studies, legal anthropology and jurisprudence ' (2020: 145). Chowdhury is correct that socio-legal scholars have increasingly turned their attention to time and have begun to offer a range of new ways to understand law, legal processes, institutions and discourses through this lens (Beynon-Jones and Grabham, 2018;Grabham, 2016;Keenan, 2013;McNeilly, 2019;Mawani, 2014). This work has revealed a variety of ways in which law produces time and how legal times connect to the social (Greenhouse, 1989).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%