ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by providing a summary of some of the features of Abstract Legal Judgement (ALJ) before detailing the types of pasts and futures, drawing on the previous chapter, that are latent in decisions that tend towards ALJ. It focuses on an exegesis of subject formation in ALJ and ways in which its temporalities produce such legal subjects, which are ‘contained’ within the legal event and are ‘born and reborn at each moment’. The presumptive identity of legal subjects produced in ALJ – that are ‘the same in terms of those capacities, cognitive and physical, which enable humans to comply with achievable and intelligible legal standards’ – can more fundamentally be explained with reference to spatial temporalities, specifically spatial pasts, produced by ALJ. The deracinated liberal legal subject in law is also rational and often referred to as the ‘reasonable man’. ALJ’s spatial temporalities enable recollection and contemplation of facts that are not present but can be reflected upon.
