Collapsing Scales and Justice

During the 2015 annual meetings of the Law and Society Association in Seattle, I attended several panels calling on audiences to mobilize concepts of space and/or time when examining law’s rituals, from the spatial dimensions of enforcement to overlooked images of time embedded in punishment (i.e. time served). For Valverde, while legal geographers handily directed our attention to matters of space, “anthropologists and historiographers” turned our gaze to the movement of law through time. However, she questions a widespread propensity to overlook the interconnection between time and space, temporality and spatiality, especially when examining how legal governance happens. By integrating such approaches, she aims to rein-vigorate law and governance studies by focusing on law’s “spatiotemporality” (1). In so doing, the book’s blurb promises to provide, “a new framework for analyzing the spatio-temporal workings of law and other forms of governance” (i).

From her vantage, the broad law and society field has not always, or sufficiently, focused on how notions of time and space in their concurrence produce law and no doubt society. But, for Valverde, “temporalization and spatialization are intertwined,” and even when scholars talk of the one without the other (e.g. Santos), it is easy to point out how these dimensions—to greater or lesser degrees—relate to one another in the “mechanisms that govern us and that we use to govern” (33–4). But how on earth are we to conceptualize such intertwining? What concepts allow us to envisage space and time as integrated rather than separable dimensions of legal governance?

To answer such questions, Valverde turns to Mikhail Bakhtin’s neologisms of intertextuality, dialogism/heteroglossia, and especially (as the book’s title indicates) chronotope to provide “heterogeneous analytical tools” (1) for studying law in this way. These tools approach space and time as integrated components of legal governance and have the bonus of working “well in combination” (i). Valverde transposes Bakhtin’s work on communication to law. She uses his idea of intertextuality, for instance, to assess how law fashions meaning through interactive exchanges between authorized discursive contexts. These exchanges are neither monolithic, nor discoverable sociologically; rather, as with Bakhtin’s analyses of modern novels, they entail multiple narrative voices drawn out through historically propelled dialogue with, and responses to, other genres of communication. Distinctively different speech acts, such as the various ones authorized from within law, do not therefore threaten the law but give it a pluralistic form.

It is, however, through a reading of Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope that Valverde develops a basic argument of the book. Bakhtin (2002) used the neologism to name how temporal and spatial relationships are interconnected and expressed through literature. For him, the key point was that the concept of time-space (or what Valverde also refers to as spatiotemporality) had “intrinsic generic significance” (15) within literature, and, as such, could be used to differentiate literary genres and the ways that they conceptualize “man” and indeed the work’s relationship “to an actual reality” (16). While abstracted thought may isolate time from space, he argues that a unique kind of thinking that happens with “living artistic perception” (16) should avoid this. Space-time instead involves an “organic cohesion” (19) that conjures time flowing through the “interior spaces” (21) as it contours figurative and literal entryways.

Applying such ideas to legal governance, Valverde eschews any metaphysical overtones that may be attributed to Bakhtin’s concept, and rejects Kantian inferences of reified time separated from space (10; 56ff). Instead, “like literary genres, different legal processes are shaped and given meaning by particular spacetimes” (11). Such spacetimes vary with genres of law, from homogenizing “penal codes” to the more plural sorts of “non-criminal [legal] systems” (12). The agora, the Roman household, and the courtroom provide exemplars for understanding chronotopes; that is to say, in respect of the latter, concrete spaces only become legal courts with the declaration of speech acts like this court is in session. But chronotopes do not simply add time to space; they require that these be linked fundamentally. That is, ‘different legal times create or shape legal spaces, and vice...