ABSTRACT
Paths are suggestive because of their metaphorical resonance, their physicality, and their connection to our very ability to think and act. This chapter looks at why it is possible to see law as a pathway and whether this conception offers anything useful to contemporary efforts to rethink law. The law is a pathway in the land, and in life, which directs that it is necessary to go this way, rather than that way The metaphor of the path also brings together temporal and spatial dimensions of law: as Lefebvre says, 'time and space are not separable within a texture so conceived: space implies time, and vice versa'. Paths can be created by individuals but they are just as commonly established collectively by people going over the same ground, doing the same thing, and being the same way. In this way, a path connects collective with individual action – the individual follows the normalised pattern established by others.
