ABSTRACT
Karin Van Marle’s writing on law’s time states that the violent and reductive nature of law stems from its tendency to make the particular general and the concrete abstract. The chapter begins by outlining the features of Concrete Legal Judgement (CLJ), drawing on the second chapter’s reading of Bergsonian and Gadamerian temporalities, and the ways in which they are connected to judicial fact construction. Contrary to Abstract Legal Judgement, the adjudicative temporalities of CLJ, taking from the writings of Henri Bergson, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Elizabeth Grosz, produce variegated, as opposed to just spatial, pasts and untimely, as opposed to teleological, futures. Gadamer’s hermeneutics have primarily been deployed in field of statutory interpretation, and have tended to focus upon the contingences of that exercise and the inevitable projection of judges and their effective history into reading of legal texts. Specifically for CLJ, unpredictable futures emerge from the legal form as senseless, which provides the possibility of new content for legal norms.
