Authorizing the Production of Urban Moral Order: Appellate Courts and Their Knowledge Games

Abstract

Using some appellate courts' reviews of projects to maintain moral order in the city as the main source of data, this article shows that an analysis of legal knowledge production that (1) is dynamic and (2) refuses to treat people and texts as totally different entities, one studied by social scientists and the other studied by lawyers, can tell us much about such familiar but seldom theorized legal maneuvers as judicial review and constitutional challenges. Choosing to analyze the dynamics of knowledge processes is inspired by Actor Network Theory (ANT), Bruno Latour's work in particular. This methodological choice is particularly appropriate because judicial review tends to avoid making judgments about the content of impugned laws or ordinances, focusing instead, as Latour does, on form and process. But insofar as legal processes in general privilege form and process to a greater or lesser degree, a more general argument is made about the appropriateness of using tools from ANT to study legal and quasi‐legal knowledge networks.

Lines that Matter: Reading the Charter at the Canada-US Border

“…Legal geography becomes a useful guide to understanding, then, the uneven and conflicting ways the border is made and experienced. While legal geography has been useful to critique the production of many spaces and practices of space-making including zoning and bylaw enforcement (Valverde 2009), sidewalks and public spaces (Blomley 2005a;Mitchell 1995), immigration (Coutin 2005;Coleman 2005), and nationalism (Darian-Smith 1994;DarianSmith 1995), far less has been said about how law has similar effects at the border.…”

“…To understand how legal discourse and decisions function, the bracket has to be understood as serving a particular function of 'signification' and equivalence (Cover 1984). The bracket is the "black box" of legal decision making-where a mess of positions, policies, relations, and effects go in, and something resembling a cogent decision based on precedent comes out (Valverde 2005). Indeed, taking a flashlight into the black box means troubling the "the taken-for-granted machinery of law" and understanding not only how the gears turn for the sake of it, but because those gears spit out the legal positions and relations we occupy and inhabit (Valverde 2005, 427).…”

Urban Citizenship and Right to the City: The Fragmentation of Claims

“…Fourth, in cities ‘place' is especially relevant for the articulation of political and administrative agendas. This is not only true for the number of urban rules regarding physical form, buildings, property, activities, temporalities and uses (Valverde, ; ). It is true too for urbanites' claims around the opening hours or the safety of a park or for the conception of residence as such.…”

Analyzing the governance of security: Jurisdiction and scale

“…Municipalities are not required to treat businesses or real estate categories equally. Occasionally they may have to justify some regulations that clash with the logics of 'higher' law -as when, in the United States, separation requirements are imposed on businesses, such as sex shops, that can have recourse to freedom of speech or other constitutional protections (Valverde 2005). And in the United States, because of the particular scrutiny that attaches to racialized forms of spatial segregation, some decisions taken in land use law (which is a great depository of police powers) may be countered by recourse to the Fair Housing Act or other tools of 'high' law (droit de justice).…”