Continua of (in)justice

Abstract

In this piece I discuss both spatial and temporal relations of justice, through comparing understandings of ‘continua’ in processul and originary descriptions of nature of law as having affect in, and giving affect to, dimensions of space and time . Processual understandings of justice are argued to be found in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ ‘lawscaping’ and its ‘continuum’ in ‘Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape Atmosphere’ (Routledge, 2015), where the ahistorical and affective nature of law is described, with no overt reference to an origin of justice, and a refutation of any ‘outside’ to law. An originary notion of justice is argued in my own work ‘Protest, Property and the Commons: Performances of Law and Resistance’ (Routledge, 2016), as supported buy the work of legal pluralist Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ ‘continuum of formalism’ (‘The Law of the Oppressed: The Construction and Reproduction of Legality in Pasargada’, Law and Society Review, 1977). I argue the existence of informal laws that persist outside of state law, that at first can be resistant to state law but can become institutionalised into formal law. This relies on the supposition that there be a an exterior to law, an ‘a-legal vacuum’, posing the importance of the origin and history of law in conferring a notion of spatial justice. The work of speculative realists Quentin Meillassoux and Martin Hagglund is used to support the uncertain spatio-temporal nature of both informal and formal processes of law, highlighting the imbrication of both time and space within spatial justice, through the agential role of in entropy (linear and nonlinear conceptions of time), arguing the inherent nature of uncertainty as (in)justice itself.