Legal Materiality

Abstract

This chapter presents legal materiality as a distinct approach within law and humanities scholarship. Legal materiality is concerned with the conditions of possibility in and through which law arises, rather than taking law’s materiality to be self-evident, as when it is regarded as a form of material culture or when objects are taken as symbols of law. It distinguishes between matters and materials: if matters are problematizations or “matters of concern” to law, materials are the attributes or properties that are enlisted in acts of interpretation. Rather than addressing materials as inert physical elements that are acted upon by law, legal materiality is concerned with how materials come to matter by being engaged in the production of legal meaning through interpretive and representational practices. Section 2.2 situates this approach in relation to a broader inheritance of materialism and materiality in the Western tradition. It considers different understandings of “materialism,” such as “new materialisms” and historical materialism, that inform but also diverge from legal materiality. Section 2.3 engages with different uses of “materiality” in recent legal scholarship, followed by a detailed discussion of its meaning in two works of legal theory that have sought to articulate a conception of legal materiality. The concluding section discusses the potentials of this approach for law and humanities scholarship to understand how materials are directly implicated in the making of legal difference rather than serving solely as law’s objects.

Transcarceral lawscapes enacted in moments of Aboriginalisation: a case-study of an Indigenous woman released on urban parole

“…In other words, the case-study method allowed me to observe the relations between bodies, objects and environments (e.g. the inmate, parole officers, the Parole Board and the court, structures, texts, schedules, physiologies, psychologies and imagined spaces) that came together and co-constituted what mattered as law in situations under study: the materiality of legal phenomena that affected social life (Kang and Kendall, 2019; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2013; 2016b; Pottage, 2012).…”

The potential for new materialist justice via Nordic feminist perspectives of law

“…4 Kang has furthermore addressed the perspective of legal materiality and new materialisms in at least one recent anthology chapter (Kang 2018 and also see eds. Kang and Kendall 2019). In this chapter however, Kang takes a slightly different starting point on new materialism than in the feminist new materialist stream followed here, by combining new materialism with other thinkers building more closely on Bruno Latour's work and thinkers generally framed under the perspective of object-oriented ontologies (OOO).…”

“…In law, new materialist research has furthermore been pursued in different ways (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2014;Davies 2017a;Kang 2018;Kang and Kendall 2019), also with explicit feminist focus (Conaghan 2013;Arvidsson 2018;Jones 2019). The Nordic feminist perspectives on law which is of specific focus here is furthermore a rich field in terms of theoretical diversification.…”

Toward a More Robust New Materialist Politics: How the Practice of Criminal Animal Trials Can Inform Contemporary Politics

“…Practitioners and critics alike have described this as the New Materialisms' "ethical" moment (Bennett 2012;Cole 2013;Kang 2019). Namely, the moment in which we find the normative payoff of the worldview shifts in ontology and epistemology -characteristics one and two above respectively -that the New Materialists call us to.…”