Jurisdiction and scale: deepening the conversation between sociolegal theory and legal scholarship
We invite you to am Annie Macdonald Langstaff/Legal Theory Workshop with Mariana Valverde, University of Toronto.
Abstract
A number of critical legal scholars have been arguing for some time that the 鈥榯echnicalities鈥� of jurisdiction should not be left to doctrinal lawyers, but should rather be explored to further pragmatist-infused critical legal analyses that are ontologically and normatively agnostic.
This project, carried out among others by Annelise Riles, converges in some ways with the methodologies developed by Foucaultian and actor-network approaches.
In this paper, I seek to contribute to the pragmatist reclaiming of jurisdiction as a fruitful area of both legal and theoretical analysis, but adding to this, from a non-legal perspective, an analysis of the play of spatiotemporal scale, which does not always coincide with jurisdictional dynamics.
About the speaker
Mariana Valverde is a professor at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 2006. Professor Valverde鈥檚 main research interests are urban law and governance, Foucault, sexuality studies, theories of spatiotemporality, and actor-network theory. In 2016, Professor Valverde received the Law and Society Association鈥檚 Harry J. Kalven Jr. Award in recognition of 鈥渆mpirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society.鈥�
Her influential books include Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance (2015), Everyday Law on the Streets: City Governance in an Age of Diversity (2012), Law鈥檚 Dream of a Common Knowledge (2003) and The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada 1880s-1920s (1991, now in its second edition).
