ABSTRACT
The language of jurisdiction today still occupies a much larger place in the procedural domain of law than in its theory or jurisprudence. Jurisdiction refers to technical and procedural matters of law’s institutions and forums of judgment. It also concerns an introspective language with which the courts and other institutions address the modes and forms of their own power without necessarily meaning to open anything of this language up to either a non-specialized or a socio-political treatment. Matters of jurisdiction are thought to be safely left to lawyers without much concern, while political and legal theory concern themselves with a set of other co-ordinates with which to engage with the specific problematic of social and normative life. As Bradin Cormack notes:
Jurisdiction belongs to law less as a substantive problem for jurisprudential investigation than as the principle and force that makes the investigation possible but which, for that reason rarely indexes its own potential as an order at law: either we ignore it and get on with the case at hand or we discover, usually at the hands of the legal expert, that the arcana of jurisdiction somehow, here or now, preempt the possibility of justice in the case at hand.1
