Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal `Technicalities' as Resources for Theory
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663909103622 |
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| Author | Mariana Valverde |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
JURISDICTION AND SCALE:
LEGAL ‘TECHNICALITIES’ AS
RESOURCES FOR THEORY
MARIANA VALVERDE
University of Toronto, Canada
ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, critical studies of law and space have fruitfully explored the insight
that law’s mechanisms can be understood in part as mapping exercises. Existing work
on law’s scales (especially that using a post-colonial studies frame) has delved into the
qualitative as well as the quantitative dimensions of scale, thus exposing some key
epistemological issues in law. This article moves the discussion forward by demon-
strating that theoretical work on ‘scale’ – outside and inside legal studies – could
benefit from studying specifically legal mechanisms such as ‘jurisdiction’. Recent
work has shown that the various modes and rationalities of governance that coexist
in every political-legal ‘interlegality’ are not necessarily tethered to any particular
scale; thus, exploring jurisdiction’s effects takes us beyond scale. As an example, the
knowledge moves that constitute what in the USA is called ‘the police power of the
state’ are briefly discussed. The fact that the gaze of police science/police regulation
is not simply geographically local, but is rather specifically urban, shows the import-
ance of understanding the complex governing manoeuvres enabled by the legal game
of jurisdiction – especially if work on ‘scale’ and jurisdiction is then supplemented
by a consideration of the plural temporalities of governance, since temporality tends
to become invisible both in analyses that privilege space and in the somewhat static
diagrams of governance that make up the game of jurisdiction.
KEY WORDS
governance; interlegality; jurisdiction; scale; space
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES © The Author(s), 2009
Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
0964 6639, Vol. 18(2), 139–157
DOI: 10.1177/0964663909103622
INTRODUCTION
SCALE FEATURES prominently in much contemporary social theory, not
only in critical geography but across the whole spectrum of critical
interdisciplinarities. Scholars working in science and technology studies,
post-colonial studies, urban studies and other fields have noted that shifts in
scale – from the local to the imperial, or from the phenomenology of urban
walking to the bird’s eye view of the official map – have enabled certain
modern forms of power/knowledge. It is by now well known that ‘technical’,
apparently politically neutral knowledge techniques refined by cartographers
and surveyors have done much more than provide information about terri-
tories (e.g. Foucault, 1980; Scott, 1998; Poovey, 1995). But now that it has
become popular to use critical studies of space to enrich legal studies (Blomley
et al., 2001), it is time to consider whether social theory can turn around and
in turn learn from detailed studies of legal governance. As a specific example
of what can be done when one sets out to reclaim ‘the technicalities’ for
theory, as Annelise Riles (2005) has exhorted us to do, it will be shown here
that the complex legal governance work accomplished through the histori-
cally variegated mechanisms of ‘jurisdiction’ can enrich social theory’s under-
standing of ‘scale’.
While overlapping with spatial governance dimensions including carto-
graphic scale, and also overlapping with the qualitative knowledge struggles
associated with legal ‘modernization’ and colonialism (e.g. Espeland, 1998;
Mitchell, 2002; Joyce, 2004), the resources of jurisdiction go beyond scale.
For example, the characteristic site of the mix of administrative and coercive
measures to order space and regulate conduct that used to be called ‘police
regulations’ – what France calls ‘droit de police’, as opposed to ‘droit de
justice’ (Napoli, 2003) – is not exactly the local, but rather the urban. Saskia
Sassen (2001, 2006), among others, has already demonstrated that the urban
is not coterminous with the local – but I would go further than Sassen to
claim that the urban is best seen as a jurisdiction, a jurisdiction that is as much
functional as it is spatial, and that is furthermore characterized by certain
habits of seeing and governing. ‘Seeing like a city’ – the gaze embodied in the
kind of regulation rooted in continental early modern police science (Dubber
and Valverde, 2006) – cannot be fully understood merely by contrasting it to
its scalar partner, ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott, 1998). More generally, focusing
on how jurisdiction exceeds scale suggests that researching the genealogy of
legal governance can be fruitful not only for legal studies but for critical
theory more generally.
SCALES OF LEGAL GOVERNANCE
In a pioneering article published over 20 years ago, Boaventura de Sousa
Santos (1987) demonstrated that critical geography’s insights about the politics
of scale – insights being then mined by post-colonial studies scholars – could
140 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(2)
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