ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with one performance of critique that is a key moment in the history of Western thinking about space and time but that has been oddly neglected in current social theory on space and spatial governance. One of the most important works in the legal anthropology of temporality is Carol Greenhouse's 1996 book A Moment's Notice, which examines the way in which particular temporalizations shaped large-scale legal systems, including Western law. In the 1980s, legal geography did not yet exist as a field, as the introduction to an important new anthology. It was thus highly innovative for noted sociolegal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos to argue that the workings of law can be usefully compared to the work done by maps. Critical sociolegal scholars have repeatedly shown that legal doctrines and notions that present themselves as timeless or inevitable can be de-naturalized, and thus debunked, by means of historical research.
