For much of the history of the western legal order, jurisdiction has been the first question of law. This book investigates the difference that jurisdiction continues to make to the ordering of normative existence. It also follows the speculation that without an account of jurisdiction, jurisprudence would be left speechless, with no power to address the conditions of attachment to legal and political order. The starting point of this book lies with the claim that a sharper focus can be given to normative legal ordering through questions of jurisdiction than can be through those of moral responsibility or social action. This is so because jurisdiction articulates both the potentiality of law and the conditions of its exercise. It provides the idiom of response to the fact that there is law and to the fact that law institutes, judges and addresses a form of life. From this viewpoint the contributors to this book examine the institution of human rights, the new global and national orders of sovereign power and of trade and information, the judgment and government of death and desire, and the address of colonial and post-colonial legal idioms. In doing this the contributors also provide for the elaboration of questions of jurisdiction as part of the resources and repertoires of jurisprudence. This book provides a point of entry to an emergent genre of writing within doctrinal, historical and critical jurisprudence that has returned to questions of jurisdiction to think again about juridical order and change. In so doing, it also points to questions that must be asked for there to be any interdisciplinary study that addresses law.

This book takes its cue from the observation that jurisdiction - as the speech of law - articulates or proclaims law. Without jurisdiction the law would be speechless, without authority and authorisation. So too would be critics who approach the law or want to live lawfully. As a field of legal knowledge and legal practice, jurisdiction is concerned with the modes of authority and the manner of the authorisation of law. It encompasses the broadest questions of the authority and the founding of legal order as well as the minutest detail of the ordering of the business of the administration and adjudication of justice. It gives us both the point of articulation of law and the technological means of the expression of law. It gives us too, the understanding of the limits of the authority of law, as well as the resources for engaging with the plurality of laws, and the means of engaging in lawful behaviour. A critical approach to law through the forms of authority and action in law provides a means of engaging with the quality of relations created and maintained through law and a means of taking responsibility for the practices of jurisdiction (and what is done in the name of the law).
This book provides a critical, and historically grounded, elaboration of the key themes of jurisdiction. It does so by offering students and scholars of law a form of critical engagement with the technologies, devices and forms of jurisdictional ordering. It shows how the common has authorised legal relations and bound persons, places, and events to the body of law. It offers a number of resources and engagements of jurisdiction on the basis that a jurisprudence of jurisdiction, if it is anything, engages forms of human relation.

First published in 1997, this volume examines questions of legal doctrine which have never been far from the study of crime. It has not always been able to keep the doctrinal aspects of law clearly in sight. There is always the pressure to turn to philosophy for the consideration of questions of moral and legal responsibility and to criminology and psychology for the analysis of action. The essays collected in this book turn again to questions of doctrine and consider the dogmatic order of law as the basis of the understanding of crime. It is the general argument of this book that without an understanding of the dogmatic order of the legal subject of crime, there will only ever be answers to questions that have never been appropriately asked. Loosely collected around questions of institution, judgement and address, these essays bring modern historical, doctrinal and cultural scholarship to bear on the practices of legal doctrine. Their aim is to offer an account of criminal law as a practice that institutes, judges and addresses the legal subject through a range of practices and knowledges. These range from the disciplinary knowledges of mental health to the cultural knowledges of femininity and female desire. They include the technical demands of law writing and court room procedure as well as symbolic powers of imagining corporate crime. These all are returned to the practical question of the production of knowledge through legal doctrine. These essays address a set of questions that have lain dormant in legal scholarship for much of the post-1945 era. In a time when the authority of law is being reconsidered at its foundations, it is appropriate too to reconsider the means and manner of the transmission of criminal law. Without an understanding of the formation of criminal law it is hardly surprising that questions of law reform raise such confusion.

For much of the history of the western legal order, jurisdiction has been the first question of law. This book investigates the difference that jurisdiction continues to make to the ordering of normative existence. It also follows the speculation that without an account of jurisdiction, jurisprudence would be left speechless, with no power to address the conditions of attachment to legal and political order. The starting point of this book lies with the claim that a sharper focus can be given to normative legal ordering through questions of jurisdiction than can be through those of moral responsibility or social action. This is so because jurisdiction articulates both the potentiality of law and the conditions of its exercise. It provides the idiom of response to the fact that there is law and to the fact that law institutes, judges and addresses a form of life. From this viewpoint the contributors to this book examine the institution of human rights, the new global and national orders of sovereign power and of trade and information, the judgment and government of death and desire, and the address of colonial and post-colonial legal idioms. In doing this the contributors also provide for the elaboration of questions of jurisdiction as part of the resources and repertoires of jurisprudence. This book provides a point of entry to an emergent genre of writing within doctrinal, historical and critical jurisprudence that has returned to questions of jurisdiction to think again about juridical order and change. In so doing, it also points to questions that must be asked for there to be any interdisciplinary study that addresses law.

First published in 1997, this volume examines questions of legal doctrine which have never been far from the study of crime. It has not always been able to keep the doctrinal aspects of law clearly in sight. There is always the pressure to turn to philosophy for the consideration of questions of moral and legal responsibility and to criminology and psychology for the analysis of action. The essays collected in this book turn again to questions of doctrine and consider the dogmatic order of law as the basis of the understanding of crime. It is the general argument of this book that without an understanding of the dogmatic order of the legal subject of crime, there will only ever be answers to questions that have never been appropriately asked. Loosely collected around questions of institution, judgement and address, these essays bring modern historical, doctrinal and cultural scholarship to bear on the practices of legal doctrine. Their aim is to offer an account of criminal law as a practice that institutes, judges and addresses the legal subject through a range of practices and knowledges. These range from the disciplinary knowledges of mental health to the cultural knowledges of femininity and female desire. They include the technical demands of law writing and court room procedure as well as symbolic powers of imagining corporate crime. These all are returned to the practical question of the production of knowledge through legal doctrine. These essays address a set of questions that have lain dormant in legal scholarship for much of the post-1945 era. In a time when the authority of law is being reconsidered at its foundations, it is appropriate too to reconsider the means and manner of the transmission of criminal law. Without an understanding of the formation of criminal law it is hardly surprising that questions of law reform raise such confusion.

This book takes its cue from the observation that jurisdiction - as the speech of law - articulates or proclaims law. Without jurisdiction the law would be speechless, without authority and authorisation. So too would be critics who approach the law or want to live lawfully. As a field of legal knowledge and legal practice, jurisdiction is concerned with the modes of authority and the manner of the authorisation of law. It encompasses the broadest questions of the authority and the founding of legal order as well as the minutest detail of the ordering of the business of the administration and adjudication of justice. It gives us both the point of articulation of law and the technological means of the expression of law. It gives us too, the understanding of the limits of the authority of law, as well as the resources for engaging with the plurality of laws, and the means of engaging in lawful behaviour. A critical approach to law through the forms of authority and action in law provides a means of engaging with the quality of relations created and maintained through law and a means of taking responsibility for the practices of jurisdiction (and what is done in the name of the law). This book provides a critical, and historically grounded, elaboration of the key themes of jurisdiction. It does so by offering students and scholars of law a form of critical engagement with the technologies, devices and forms of jurisdictional ordering. It shows how the common has authorised legal relations and bound persons, places, and events to the body of law. It offers a number of resources and engagements of jurisdiction on the basis that a jurisprudence of jurisdiction, if it is anything, engages forms of human relation.