The Pragmatic Sanction of Materials: Notes for an Ethnography of Legal Substances
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2012.00568.x |
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Author | Javier Lezaun |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 39, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2012
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 20±38
The Pragmatic Sanction of Materials:
Notes for an Ethnography of Legal Substances
Javier Lezaun*
How is the law bound to the material world? This article examines the
production of reference materials, artefacts that incarnate legally
relevant measurements and serve as a transitional object for the law in
its approximation to the stuff of the world. The argument, an opening
for an ethnographic investigation into the life of legal materials, is
based on a study of the work conducted at the Institute for Reference
Materials and Measurements (IRMM), an agency that, for over fifty
years, has fabricated official versions of the objects and substances
mentioned in European law.
INTRODUCTION
How does law come to matter? How does it manage to refer to anything
material at all, and thus introduce a new sort of force ± a legal force ± into
the world? By what strange alchemy is a legal obligation transformed into a
material constraint? This essay explores a peculiar intermediary between the
legal and the material, a point of passage for the law as it bridges the distance
that separates it from the world of mundane objects. It deals with the
production of reference materials, official substances that incarnate legally
relevant measurements, transitional objects that offer the law a point of
contact with the stuff of the world. The discussion is based on a study of the
20
ß2012 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2012 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, School of Anthropology and
Museum Ethnography, 64 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PN, England
javier.lezaun@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Initial fieldwork for this project was sponsored by the Centre for Analysis of Risk and
Regulation (CARR) at the London School of Economics. Subsequent research received
funding from the European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh
Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 263447 ±
BioProperty. I would like to thank the members of IRMM staff who collaborated with
my research, and Michael Guggenheim and Ann Kelly for comments on earlier drafts of
the article.
work carried out at the Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements
(IRMM), a research establishment that, for more than fifty years, has
produced the physical referents of European Union law.
A reference material is a physical object with agreed upon qualities ± as
the International Organization for Standardization puts it, `a material, suffi-
ciently homogeneous and stable with respect to one or more specific
properties, which has been established to be fit for its intended use in a
measurement process' ± and IRMM is the agency tasked by European
authorities with the fabrication of dependably constant versions of the
entities mentioned in EU legislation. Located on the outskirts of the Flemish
town of Geel, the Institute traces its origin back to the inception of European
integration: its forebear, the Central Bureau for Nuclear Measurements
(CBNM), was established under the auspices of the 1957 Euratom Treaty.
Since then, IRMM, part of the European Commission's Joint Research
Centre, has steadily expanded its mission from its original nuclear mandate,
and today produces reference materials in virtually all areas of European
regulatory law.
Perusing the catalogue of materials available from IRMM is like reading
the inventory of a curiosity cabinet of European integration. Among the
more than 500 substances listed there, one finds bovine eyes positive for
clenbuterol (Certified Reference Material BCR-674: vials containing eye
liquid from cows fed on the chemical), and toasted bread with acrylamide
(ERM-BD273: bread powder in amber glass bottles); a reference for `urban
dust' (BCM-605: used to detect the use of chemical compounds in
gasoline), or the recently produced first-ever certified nanoparticle (ERM-
FD100: glass ampoules with silica particles suspended in water certified for
size).
1
These are all entities mentioned, somewhat casually, in European laws
and regulations, but which the law would be unable to find in the world if it
were not for the availability of an official, stable version of the material in
question. Take for instance the recent legislation on the presence of con-
taminants i n foodstuff s.
2
Among many oth er things, it f orbids the
commercialization of milk containing more than 0.020 milligrams of lead
per litre. To enforce or comply with this rule, samples of milk are routinely
collected and tested for the presence of lead, but given the required degree of
confidence in measurement, the chances are that different analytical methods
applied to the same sample ± or the same method carried out at different
locations or by different people ± will yield results sufficiently dissimilar to
cast doubt on whether the sample in question is positive or negative for
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1 The different acronyms refer to the programmes under which the different reference
materials were produced. BCR stands for Bureau Communautaire de ReÂfeÂrence, the
umbrella under which most materials were produced in the 1980s and 1990s. ERM
(European Reference Material) is a brand introduced in the last decade.
2 Commission Regulation (EC) No. 1881/2006.
ß2012 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2012 Cardiff University Law School
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