Judicial Power and Legal Temporalities

Tanzil Chowdhury, Queen Mary University of London

This paper argues that what it describes as legal temporalities are sites of power in adjudication that reveal the politics of legal decision-making. It does this by first offering two accounts of law and time. The first presupposes time as a background, universal invariant or ‘container’, in which legal events simply take place in (substantivalist time). The second account argues that legal rules and materials produce their own temporalities (legal temporalities). Using the latter as a point of departure, and rejecting a correspondence theory between law and fact, this paper instead argues that adjudicative temporalities shape fact construction in decision-making; specifically in how it renders and shapes a range of legal subjectivities, events and ascriptions of responsibility. 
 

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