ABSTRACT
The concept of jurisdiction designates the authority to speak the law – an authority presupposing a setting apart of the legal from the non-legal.1 Without such acts of separation, law’s existence can be neither adequately conceived nor materially manifested, since their very performance delineates its borders and time of reign.2 These acts annunciate and bear the ‘is’ of law rather than being one of its products or functions. Yet, though at once both source of law’s being and tangible evidence of its presence, the spatial and temporal boundaries defined by jurisdiction do not simply demarcate the legal empire. Any reference to law embodies designation of who and what occupies its ‘space’, where its limits lie and what exists beyond them, whilst evocations concerning time render an understanding of what can and cannot move or change within law, of what remains static, perennial or prohibited in its temporal domain. So jurisdictional acts of separation cohere specific structures of human existence – structures which, as well as providing organisational principles for social action, also configure the way in which the social world is understood.3
