Disentangling Law
21 Pages Posted: 20 Jan 2014
Date Written: January 19, 2014
Abstract
This is a paper, forthcoming in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Following the call to focus on law as a set of practices, I develop Callon’s concept of framing (which I refer to here as bracketing) in relation to law. Bracketing refers to the process of delimiting a sphere within which interactions take place more or less independently of a surrounding context. To do so is to temporarily rearrange the relations that constitute legal reality. A legal contract, for example, draws certain objects and relationships into sharper focus, ignoring or deliberately excluding others. I offer several examples of legal bracketing, some foundational, others highly routinized, and note several distinctive characteristics. I then use bracketing to think about legal categorization, law as effect (rather than essence), law’s success, and the heterogeneity found within a legal frame.
Keywords: performativity, law and society, relationality, entanglement
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