1932

Abstract

Following the call to focus on law as a set of practices, I develop Michel Callon's concept of framing (which I refer to here as bracketing) in relation to law. Bracketing is the process of delimiting a sphere within which interactions take place more or less independently of a surrounding context. It temporarily rearranges the relations that constitute legal reality. A legal contract, for example, draws certain objects and relationships into sharper focus, ignoring or deliberately excluding others. I offer several examples of legal bracketing—some foundational, others highly routinized—and note several distinctive characteristics. I then use bracketing to think about legal categorization, law as effect (rather than essence), law's success, and the heterogeneity found within a legal frame.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110413-030719
2014-11-03
2024-03-29
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/deliver/fulltext/lawsocsci/10/1/annurev-lawsocsci-110413-030719.html?itemId=/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110413-030719&mimeType=html&fmt=ahah

Literature Cited

  1. Abbott A. 1995. Things of boundaries. Soc. Res. 62:4857–82 [Google Scholar]
  2. Allen J. 2008. Pragmatism and power, or the power to make a difference in a radically contingent world. Geoforum 39:1613–24 [Google Scholar]
  3. Amin A. 2004. Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place. Geogr. Ann. 86:133–44 [Google Scholar]
  4. Barnes T. 2008. American pragmatism: towards a geographical introduction. Geoforum 39:1542–54 [Google Scholar]
  5. Barry A, Slater D. 2002. Technology, politics and the market: an interview with Michel Callon. Econ. Soc. 31:2285–306 [Google Scholar]
  6. Blomley N. 2003. Law, property, and the geography of violence: the frontier, the survey, and the grid. Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr. 93:1121–41 [Google Scholar]
  7. Blomley N. 2005. The borrowed view: privacy, propriety, and the entanglements of property. Law Soc. Inq. 30:4617–61 [Google Scholar]
  8. Blomley N. 2007. Making private property: enclosure, common right and the work of hedges. Rural Hist. 18:11–21 [Google Scholar]
  9. Blomley N. 2008a. Enclosure, common right, and the property of the poor. Soc. Leg. Stud. 17:311–31 [Google Scholar]
  10. Blomley N. 2008b. Simplification is complicated: property, nature, and the rivers of law. Environ. Plan. A 40:1825–40 [Google Scholar]
  11. Blomley N. 2011. Cuts, flows, and the geographies of property. Law Cult. Humanit. 7:2203–16 [Google Scholar]
  12. Blomley N. 2012. Begging to differ: panhandling, public space, and municipal property. Property on Trial: Cases in Context E Tucker, J Muir, B Ziff 393–425 Toronto: Osgoode Soc. [Google Scholar]
  13. Blomley N. 2013a. Performing property, making the world. Can. J. Law Jurisprud. 27:123–48 [Google Scholar]
  14. Blomley N. 2013b. What sort of legal space is a city?. Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and Politics of Spatial In-Betweens A Brighenti 1–20 Farnham, UK: Ashgate [Google Scholar]
  15. Blomley N. 2014a. Disentangling property, performing space. Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space MR Glass, R Rose-Redwood 147–75 New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
  16. Blomley N. 2014b. Learning from Larry: pragmatism and the habits of legal space. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography I Braverman, N Blomley, D Delaney, A Kedar 77–94 Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
  17. Blomley N. 2014c. The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process. Trans. Inst. British Geogr. In press. doi: 10.1111/tran.12058
  18. Bourdieu P. 1985. The social space and the genesis of groups. Theory Soc. 14:6723–44 [Google Scholar]
  19. Bourdieu P. 1987. The force of law: toward a sociology of the juridical field. Hastings Law J. 38:814–58 [Google Scholar]
  20. Braverman I. 2008. Governing certain things: the regulation of street trees in four North American cities. Tulane Environ. Law J. 22:1–26 [Google Scholar]
  21. Bryan B. 2011. Legality against orality. Law Cult. Humanit. 9:2261–74 [Google Scholar]
  22. Callon M. 1998a. An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology. See Callon 1998c 244–69
  23. Callon M. 1998b. Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics. See Callon 1998c 1–57
  24. Callon M. 1998c. The Laws of the Markets Oxford, UK: Blackwell
  25. Callon M. 2007. What does it mean to say that economics is performative?. See MacKenzie et al. 2007 311–57
  26. Camic C, Gross N, Lamont M. 2011. Introduction. Social Knowledge in the Making1–40 Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press [Google Scholar]
  27. Cloatre E, Wright N. 2012. A socio-legal analysis of an actor-world: the case of carbon trading and the clean development mechanism. J. Law Soc. 39:176–92 [Google Scholar]
  28. Demos R. 1923. Legal fictions. Int. J. Ethics 34:137–58 [Google Scholar]
  29. Feinman JM. 1989. The jurisprudence of classification. Stanford Law Rev. 41:3661–717 [Google Scholar]
  30. Fitzpatrick D, McWilliam A. 2013. Bright-line fever: simple legal rules and complex property customs among the Fataluku of East Timor. Law Soc. Rev. 47:2311–43 [Google Scholar]
  31. Goffman I. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience New York: Harper & Row
  32. Hamilton JW. 2002. Theories of categorization: a case study of cheques. Can. J. Law Soc. 17:115–37 [Google Scholar]
  33. Holm P. 2007. Which way is up on Callon?. See MacKenzie et al. 2007 225–43
  34. Johns F. 2013. Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
  35. Jones M. 2010. Limits to thinking space relationally. Int. J. Law Context 6:3243–55 [Google Scholar]
  36. Knauer NJ. 2011. Legal fictions and juristic truth. St. Thomas Law Rev. 23:1–49 [Google Scholar]
  37. Langdell CC. 1871. Cases on the Law of Contracts Boston: Little, Brown
  38. Latour B. 1986. Visualization and cognition: drawing things together. Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 H Kuklik 1–40 Greenwich, CT: JAI [Google Scholar]
  39. Latour B. 1987. Science in Action Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press
  40. Law J. 1999. After ANT: complexity, naming and topology. See Law & Hassard 1999 1–14
  41. Law J. 2009. Actor network theory and material semiotics. The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory BS Turner 141–58 Oxford, UK: Blackwell [Google Scholar]
  42. Law J. 2012. Collateral realities. The Politics of Knowledge F Domínguez Rubio, P Baert 156–78 Abingdon, UK: Routledge [Google Scholar]
  43. Law J, Hassard J. 1999. Actor Network Theory and After Oxford, UK: Blackwell
  44. Law J, Urry J. 2004. Enacting the social. Econ. Soc. 33:390–410 [Google Scholar]
  45. Levi R, Valverde M. 2008. Studying law by association: Bruno Latour goes to the Conseil d'État. Law Soc. Inq. 33:3805–25 [Google Scholar]
  46. MacKenzie D, Muniesa F, Siu L. 2007. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press
  47. Massey D. 2005. For Space London: Sage
  48. Mertz E. 2007. The Language of Law School: Learning to Think like a Lawyer Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
  49. Mitchell T. 1991. The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 85:177–96 [Google Scholar]
  50. Mitchell T. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
  51. Mitchell T. 2007. The properties of markets. See MacKenzie et al. 2007 244–75
  52. Mohr R, Contini F. 2011. Reassembling the legal: “the wonders of modern science” in court-related proceedings. Griffith Law Rev. 20:994–1019 [Google Scholar]
  53. Mol A. 1999. Ontological politics: a word and some questions. See Law & Hassard 1999 74–89
  54. Nedelsky J. 1990. Law, boundaries, and the bounded self. Representations 30:162–89 [Google Scholar]
  55. Painter J. 2010. Rethinking territory. Antipode 42:51090–118 [Google Scholar]
  56. Peters JS. 2008. Legal performance good and bad. Law Cult. Humanit. 4:179–200 [Google Scholar]
  57. Pickering A. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press
  58. Prudham S. 2008. The fictions of autonomous inventions: accumulation by dispossession, commodification, and life patents in Canada. Privatization B Mansfield 14–37 Oxford, UK: Blackwell. [Google Scholar]
  59. R. v. Stuart 2010. B.C.P.C18
  60. Riles A. 2006. [Deadlines]: removing the brackets on politics in bureaucratic and anthropological analysis. Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge A Riles 71–92 Ann Arbor: Univ. Mich. Press [Google Scholar]
  61. Riles A. 2011. Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press
  62. Rose C. 1988. Crystals and mud in property law. Stanford Law Rev. 40:577–610 [Google Scholar]
  63. Rose C. 1990. Property as storytelling: perspectives from game theory, narrative theory, feminist theory. Yale J. Law Humanit. 2:37–57 [Google Scholar]
  64. Sarat A, Kearns TR. 1992. Introduction. Law's Violence A Sarat, TR Kearns 1–23 Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan Press [Google Scholar]
  65. Sawyer S. 2004. Crude properties: the sublime and slime of oil operations in the Eucadorian Amazon. Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy K Verdery, C Humphrey 85–111 Oxford, UK: Berg [Google Scholar]
  66. Scott JC. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press
  67. Shamir R. 1996. Suspended in space: Bedouins under the law of Israel. Law Soc. Rev. 30:231–58 [Google Scholar]
  68. Singer JW. 2000. Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press
  69. Slater D. 2002. From calculation to alienation: disentangling economic abstractions. Econ. Soc. 31:2234–49 [Google Scholar]
  70. Steinberg T. 1995. Slide Mountain: Or the Folly of Owning Nature Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
  71. Vaihinger H. 1966 (1935). The Philosophy of ‘As If’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind transl. CK Ogden New York: Barnes and Noble
  72. Valverde M. 2009. Jurisdiction and scale: legal “technicalities” as resources for theory. Soc. Leg. Stud. 18:2139–57 [Google Scholar]
  73. Valverde M. 2012. The crown in a multicultural age: the changing epistemology of (post)colonial sovereignty. Soc. Leg. Stud. 21:13–21 [Google Scholar]
  74. Williams R. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110413-030719
Loading
  • Article Type: Review Article
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error