Book Review: Time, Temporality and Legal Judgment by Tanzil Chowdhury
| Author | Kathryn McNeilly |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211011715 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
TANZIL CHOWDHURY, Time, Temporality and Legal Judgment. London: Routledge, 2020, pp. 172,
ISBN 9781138324503, £120 (hbk).
Time, Temporality and Legal Judgment is the most recent contribution to what its author
Tanzil Chowdhury describes as the ‘nascent “temporal turn”in socio-legal studies, legal
anthropology and jurisprudence’(2020: 145). Chowdhury is correct that socio-legal
scholars have increasingly turned their attention to time and have begun to offer a
range of new ways to understand law, legal processes, institutions and discourses
through this lens (Beynon-Jones and Grabham, 2018; Grabham, 2016; Keenan, 2013;
McNeilly, 2019; Mawani, 2014). This work has revealed a variety of ways in which
law produces time and how legal times connect to the social (Greenhouse, 1989).
Chowdhury’s contribution to this growing literature is to place focus on adjudication –
specifically within the field of criminal law –and render visible the temporal building
blocks that provide the foundations of this juridical practice. The book lies at the inter-
section of multiple bodies of thought, which are woven together in a complex and enligh-
tening way. These bodies include not only law and time literature but also theories of
adjudication and a variety of philosophical literature on time. The result is an approach
that makes a stimulating new contribution to advance socio-legal thinking on time, as
well as offering insights in the wider fields of criminal law, adjudication, and
jurisprudence.
The book’s central claim is that legally produced times –or what Chowdhury terms
‘adjudicative temporalities’(2020: 2) –serve to influence fact construction in legal judg-
ment and, in turn, structure how the legal event and subject are formed. This claim flows
from de-centring the primary influence of legal rules. Instead, the reader’s attention is
turned to adjudicative temporalities as driving legal adjudication and the facts, events
and subjects that are apprehended within it. Importantly for Chowdhury, the selection
or use of adjudicative temporalities by a judge is influenced by wider social structures.
The result is that ‘through temporality juridical power is articulated’(2020: 2). The
book’s analysis, therefore, seeks not just to describe the role of time in adjudication,
but also to uncover the potential for legal judgment to reach outcomes which are socially
just. Adjudicative temporalities accordingly come into view as ‘a particular type of legal
temporality’(2020: 25) which stand to be further explored and considered.
In illustrating this overarching thesis, ‘two antipodal types of legal judgment’are
articulated. These are distinguished with reference to the adjudicative temporalities that
they employ (2020: 8). The first is referred to as ‘Abstract Legal Judgment’. This is
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
2021, Vol. 30(6) 959–969
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639211011715
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