ABSTRACT
It is a difficult thing to try to navigate the law without an idea of jurisdiction. This it seems is one piece of knowledge over which lawyers in particular may have no special claim. It is true that jurisdiction on the one hand concerns very technical matters of law. For this reason, it is assumed to be a problem confined to the discourse of the legal profession who are thought to negotiate the problem of how laws work in practice, when and where they should apply, over whom and with what authority. The techniques of law in this sense might be equivalent to the techniques of cooking, mechanics or music: the imperative is to ‘know your craft’. Yet on the other hand, to be concerned about problems of jurisdiction, one does not necessarily need to have any special knowledge of the law: to be able to represent the law to oneself or to others. It may, in fact, be more advantageous not to know the law all that well; to really know it a little less perfectly than most and therefore to make of one’s description of it more of an expression than a representation.
