ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a material, or ‘object friendly’, analysis of law’s timely effects. I investigate the implications for law and society scholarship of shifting our account of law and time to incorporate objects, nonhuman agencies, and the ‘brewing’ of legal temporalities. Such an approach is explicitly ‘praxiographic’ (Mol, 2003), foregrounding practices, watching for objects to come into being. My aim is to put into conversation longstanding law and society approaches to time and legal-temporal ordering with new materialism, anthropological perspectives on time, and law and science and technology studies scholarship (‘law and STS’). I excavate a way of thinking about legal time and temporal legal actions as disaggregated instead of universal, generated as well as generative, and provisional upon networked relationships. Within complex assemblages of human and nonhuman actors, people, artefacts, and matter of various types interact, with the effect of ‘folding’ or ‘percolating’ time (following Latour and Serres). With this in mind, it becomes possible to account for the lively actions of ‘things’ in constituting legal temporalities.
