Law, Registration, and the State - Making Identities Through Space, Place, and Movement

This book provides an original and compelling analysis of registration as a dynamic process which makes and unmakes legal identities.
Critical legal and socio-legal scholarship tends to assume that registration is a textually mediated act of statecraft which governs through the technology of writing. Taking a different approach, this book develops movement as socio-legal method to illustrate the legal, social, and bureaucratic layers of movement which unfold in everyday engagements with the law. The book presents empirical and theoretical analysis of historical, contemporary, and future-oriented places of registration: a community hub, a city of pilgrimage, and the General Register Office. Drawing from diverse perspectives across anthropology, geography, sociology, architecture, and mobility studies, the book argues for an understanding of registration as evolving, socially constructed, and shaped by spatial imaginaries which are materialised in its architecture. This mobile understanding of registration expands conceptual discussions of legal materiality whilst opening up possibilities for legal identities unconstrained by the assumed desirability of stability or endurance.
This interdisciplinary book will appeal primarily to a sociolegal, critical legal, and legal geography readership; but it will also be of interest to those in other disciplines concerned with materiality, movement, and statecraft.

List of contents

1. Introduction 2. Registration as Tessellating Space 3. Registry Architecture 4. Spatial Machinery 5. Journeying with Law 6. Registering Life: Betwixt and Between

About the author

Jess Smith is Lecturer in Law at the University of Lincoln, UK.

Summary

This book provides an original and compelling analysis of registration as a dynamic process which makes and unmakes legal identities.

Product details

• Authors: Jess Smith, Smith Jess
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 28.07.2023
• EAN: 9781032261034
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3226103-4
• No. of pages: 128
• Series: Social Justice
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics; Social sciences, law, business > Law > International law, foreign law; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography, Social Theory, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy, LAW / Constitutional, LAW / Jurisprudence, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Social Theory, Jurisprudence & general issues, Social Law, Human Geography, Jurisprudence and general issues, Constitutional & administrative law, Constitutional and administrative law: general, Social law and Medical law