ABSTRACT
Socio-legal scholars would insist that law is present not only in formal, bureaucratic moments, but also in everyday urban encounters. One crucial legal device that shapes the way we think of the city as a legal space is jurisdiction. Jurisdiction may also have a geographic dimension, being constrained by particular territorial distinctions. Either the municipality has jurisdiction, or some other legal order does. Many legal conflicts, of course, necessarily bump up against, challenge or attempt to use such jurisdictional architecture, framing certain phenomena as local, national or international matters, governed by distinct jurisdictions. Jurisdiction operates according to such a scalar logic. Santos's observation that legal scales translate the same social objects into different legal objects is certainly in evidence in Adams and Federated, in which the actions of the homeless person are variously constituted as the freedom-loving act of a rights-bearing citizen or an objectionable presence.
