This winter colloquium explores the relationship between law and time at two levels. One, at the conceptual and material levels in which we seek to address how the arena of law and legality is constituted through either overt or very minute constituents of time and temporality. For instance, we seek to address how a legal regime, governing certain aspects of life such as work, migration, employment, and not least marriage and domesticity, is inherently constituted through ideas and practices of control over others’ time. Similarly, if security of property and life are two basic constituents of the ‘rule of law’, we aspire to explore the temporal aspect of the making of the rule of law through the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries in diverse geographical settings. In doing this, we desire to investigate how both law and time become social resources for contestation and adaptation, thus revealing the social loci of power. Of interest will, therefore, be to understand how a particular regime of legal temporality creates conditions for authority, empowerment, and resistance.

The second level of our engagement is justicing or ‘law in practice’. What is the law’s own temporality that structures various choices of people in accessing justice? We seek to understand the relationship between law and time through the practices of law which are observed both inside and outside the courtroom. If justice delayed is justice denied, then clearly the functioning of the law and the choices to seek justice has an inseparable temporal element. Various institutions of justicing – courts, police, and other non-state entities – affect the pace of justice delivery, thus putting law and time in one bind. From the time of filing a complaint through the trial to the actual judgement, law not only ‘takes its due course’ but also works at its own pace. The temporality of justice thus affects the nature of justice itself.

The colloquium 2024/25 is organised by Dr. Nitin Sinha.

Poster

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