Critical Analysis of Law Workshop: Nicholas Blomley

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LAW WORKSHOP

presents

Nicholas Blomley
Simon Fraser University

Disentangling Law: The Practice of Bracketing

Tuesday, December 2, 2014
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park

Following the call to focus on law as a set of practices, I develop Michel Callon’s concept of framing (which I refer to here as bracketing) in relation to law. Bracketing is the process of delimiting a sphere within which interactions take place more or less independently of a surrounding context.  It temporarily rearranges 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.

Nicholas Blomley is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University. He has a longstanding interest in the interface between law and space, in general, with a particular focus on real property, understood as a complex, political and indelibly social series of enactments. He has conducted research into urban gentrification, panhandling, gardening and - most recently -  the negotiation of property and space in the contemporary Crown-indigenous treaty process in British Columbia.

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.