Book Review: A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place
| Author | Marianne Constable |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918822413 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
OLIVIA BARR, A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2016, pp. xii þ243, ISBN 978-1-138-85039-2, £92.00 (hbk).
In this strangely unsettled yet compelling book, Olivia Barr argues that the common law
‘moves’ and that such movement is revealing of material and technological practices of
jurisdiction. Common law practices of movement have implications for ‘minor jurispru-
dence’ and for the responsible exercise of office, she argues. By the movement of the
common law, Barr does not simply mean that the common law changes, as conventional
legal historians might put it. Rather, she draws particular attention to the places persons
go and refers to the spread, the reach, the withdrawal and the retreat of common law
jurisdiction over live persons and dead ones, which takes place, so to speak, through
territories and over the course of time. She shows how the physical movement of persons
allows the common law to expand to where its subjects walk, while the death of its
subjects both motivates and troubles the establishment of common law jurisdiction. And
she notes, more than once, that ‘common law is not as everywhere as it seems to be’
(pp. 5, 10).
The case studies in Barr’s third and fourth chapters make these points most clearly
and one wishes they came earlier in the book. There is something a little cryptic, or
perhaps ungrounded or disconnected, about the argument in the Introduction, despite the
gradual development of Barr’s argument through an ‘invitation to walk’ and three
distinct ‘excursions’ and despite the pains Barr takes to present an ‘itinerary’ or outline
of what is coming. The two conceptual chapters of the explanatory Part I on ‘the
responsible jurist’ and ‘the importance of movement’ repeat in a disciplined fashion and
with elaboration many of the points of the Introduction; they make a lot more sense
however when one returns to them after having encountered the fascinating material of
Part II. These latter chapters lead one – to continue Barr’s conceit – into more varied
surroundings. They ‘perform’ jurisprudence or ‘renarrativize’, in Barr’s terms, the walk-
ing of a burial party in New South Wales in 1799 and the death, burial and reburial of an
Australian astrophysicist who died in 2000 in a US facility at the south pole. Disavowing
claims as to the completeness and accuracy of her own retellings, Barr nevertheless pays
excruciatingly close and rewarding attention to the language and appeals to laws and
jurisdictions in legal and non-legal texts.
In the first example, Barr shows how the laws of empire accompany the 18th-century
burial party ‘into the woods beyond’ their ostensibly proper territory as they to go to bury
their dead. The laws, like the burial party, move and camp along the way, not so much
Social & Legal Studies
2019, Vol. 28(2) 270–278
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663918822413
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