A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place

Set amongst a spatial turn in the humanities, and jurisprudence more specifically, this book calls for a greater attention to legal movement, in both its technical and material forms.

Despite the various ways in which the spatial turn has been taken up in legal thought, questions of law, movement and its materialities are too often overlooked. This book addresses this oversight, and it does so through an attention to the materialities of legal movement.

Arguing that movement is fundamental to the very terms of the common law’s existence, taking as an example the judicial practices of walking and burial, it addresses how law moves through patterns of technical and material practice.

Primarily set in the postcolonial context of Australia - though ranging beyond this nationalised topography, both spatially and temporally - this book responds directly to the challenge of how to live with a contemporary form of colonial legal inheritance.

More generally, though, this jurisprudence of movement argues that we must take seriously the challenge of living with law, and to think more carefully, not only about its spatial productions, but also the place-making activities of common law.