ABSTRACT
In this piece I discuss both spatial and temporal relations of justice, through comparing understandings of ‘continua’ in processual and originary descriptions of nature of law as having affect in, and giving affect to, dimensions of space and time.
Processual understandings of justice are found in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s ‘lawscaping’ and its ‘continuum’ in Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (Routledge, 2015), where the ahistorical and affective nature of law is described, with no overt reference to an origin of justice and a refutation of any ‘outside’ to law. An originary notion of justice is argued in my own work Protest, Property and the Commons: Performances of Law and Resistance (Routledge, 2016), as supported by the work of legal pluralist Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s ‘continuum of formalism’ (‘The Law of the Oppressed: The Construction and Reproduction of Legality in Pasargada’, Law and Society Review, 1977). I argue the existence of informal laws that persist outside of state law, that at first can be resistant to state law but can then become institutionalised into formal law. This relies on the supposition that there be an exterior to law, an ‘a-legal vacuum’, posing the importance of the origin and history of law in conferring a notion of spatial justice.
The work of speculative realists Quentin Meillassoux and Martin Hägglund is used to support the uncertain spatio-temporal nature of both informal and formal processes of law, highlighting the imbrication of both time and space within spatial justice, through the agential role of entropy (linear and nonlinear conceptions of time), arguing the inherent nature of uncertainty as (in)justice itself.
