Managing time: speeding up and slowing down in the immigration bail court

Abstract

This article draws on recent theoretical interventions into the relationship between time and law to make sense of the role of time in the context of immigration bail hearings in the United Kingdom. It presents an analysis of the ways in which the Home Office, the First-Tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), and immigration judges manage time, and proposes that the impacts of this management are threefold. First, there is a trend towards the speeding up of hearings. Second, there is a simultaneous trend towards the slowing down of hearings. Third, both of these trends are mobilized to generate specific atmospheres that indirectly manage time. In exploring both the obvious and the obscured ways in which time is managed, this article untangles the seemingly contradictory processes of simultaneous speeding up and slowing down, facilitating a fuller understanding of the consequential ways in which power operates within immigration tribunals.