Abstract
Reading the contributions to our Heeding the Call of Justice and Commentary Sections reminded me of the centrality of place and of jurisdiction to law and legal theory. Law’s legitimacy depends upon the crafting of boundaries, often so naturalized as to seem inevitable. Thus we take for granted that “jurisdiction” – the legitimate reach of particular legal institutions – is a matter of territory. When linked to territory, jurisdiction seems to come before justice and the assertion of jurisdictional prerogatives may stand in the way of its realization.
Yet territory is only one way to conceive of the scope of legal authority, and new jurisdictional understandings may foster rather than impede justice. Thus the twentieth century witnessed the development of jurisdictional understandings that were inexorably linked to the claims of justice: in the Nuremberg trials, Allied nations (rather than any particular nation) essentially willed international law into being in order to prosecute Nazi military aggression. Today, controversies surrounding the principle of universal jurisdiction present only the most recent incarnation of long-standing practices allowing courts, in the name of justice, to claim jurisdiction beyond their own political borders.
Moreover, “Juris-dictio,” or “speaking the law,” manifests law as performative through speech; it signifies not just a spatial demarcation of law’s reach but also a staging of authority to make pronouncements that present themselves as being “law.” Successful assertions of jurisdiction depend on a recognition that certain pronouncements are expressive of norms recognized by particular communities, and indeed can constitute communities through discourse and practice.
Reading the contributions to our Heeding the Call of Justice and Commentary Sections reminded me of both the power and yet the contingent quality of law’s jurisdictional claims and line-drawing obsessions.