Legal change within any legal system\u2014where laws are amended, where new standards are introduced through judicial decisions (as in common law systems), or where existing regimes are overhauled altogether (as with Brexit)\u2014is a common phenomenon. Depending on the scope of reforms, the scale of change can be minor or major. My current research engages with the latter: major changes in the legal field as part of macro legal reform initiatives such as justice-sector reforms in countries emerging from conflict or crises (I understand legal field in the Bourdieusian sense, for explanation see here<\/a>).<\/p>\n As a regulatory tool, law sets normative standards, introduces notions of duty and rights, and vests institutional authority and responsibility in specific actors to correct or punish those whose actions fall outside identified thresholds. When a new law or legal standard is introduced, existing thresholds and sites of authority can shift, demanding that those who use and encounter the \u2018new\u2019 law change their attitudes, expectations and behaviour to align with it. Moments of transition allow us to observe what happens when plural normative orders coincide and how legality is constructed and practised by those caught in the middle.<\/p>\n In-between moments of legal change<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The norms, practices and institutions that make up the \u2018old\u2019 legal order\u2014whether traditional or state based\u2014are usually established through years of practice and engagement, creating a legal field that is \u2018settled\u2019. In contrast, when a reform initiative takes place, the \u2018new\u2019 legal order that is introduced is \u2018unsettled\u2019. It requires major changes in normative standards, institutional arrangements and sites of authority to enable a substantial shift away from existing practices. Individuals caught in the midst of these changes can resist, go along with, or negotiate the desired reforms as they transition from one way of doing, seeing and behaving to another. It is this moment of transition that I am interested in studying, which I have attempted to capture through the following sketch (inspired by Perry Kessaris\u2019 encouragement to conceptualise arguments in designerly ways<\/a>).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When a new law or legal standard is introduced, existing thresholds and sites of authority can shift, demanding those who use and encounter the \u2018new\u2019 law to align their attitudes, expectations and behaviour with it. Merry\u2019s research in Fiji<\/a> shows how CEDAW\u2011driven criminal law reforms recategorised previously tolerated practices as \u2018unlawful\u2019 and replaced existing reconciliatory traditions. Similar examples appear across the Global South, where transformational reforms seek social change through law (some examples are Merry 2009<\/a> Goodale 2008<\/a>, Eslava 2015<\/a>).<\/p>\n My current research examines this phenomenon in the context of wide-scale justice sector reform initiatives in Timor Leste, where I gathered the practices, processes and procedures relied by the first-level actors — lawyers, prosecutors and judges — who were carrying out legal work to navigate the shifting normative, institutional and authoritative standards ( for earlier publications exploring some of these aspects see Reheem Shaila 2025<\/a>, Reheem Shaila 2023<\/a> and Reheem Shaila 2022<\/a>). Through the experiences of these actors, I study what kinds of legality emerge in these moments of flux. Second, I map how those who are caught in the middle navigate the transitions: what strategies they undertake, and what we can learn about how and when they exercise their agency. Third, I demonstrate how these in-between moments are crucial for capturing the trajectory of social and legal change.<\/p>\n Liminality as a conceptual lens<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n To conceptualise these in-between moments, I draw on the concept of \u2018liminality\u2019 from anthropology. Emerging from van Gennep\u2019s study of rituals, he developed \u2018liminality\u2019 to describe the in-between moments of transition<\/a> that help individuals transition through major life changes. In van Gennep\u2019s use of the term<\/a>, liminality is personal, part of individual experiences that allow people to move from \u2018here\u2019 to \u2018there\u2019. Within law, liminality has been used to trace the experiences of migrant workers<\/a> and asylum seekers<\/a> who are caught in a limbo between legal systems. Moving away from the individual micro-space, the concept has more recently been used to mark liminal spaces, liminal regulation, and so on. I rely on the way Thomassen and others use liminality<\/a> to analyse in-between moments of broader social and institutional transition. Liminality as a concept allows us to capture these phases, and established qualitative methods in law<\/a> enable us to map how people navigate such moments of change.<\/p>\n Transitional legality and liminal legal consciousness<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n People caught in the liminal space of legal change understand and relate to shifting normative orders and institutional arrangements in distinct ways. They can (dis)engage with both the familiar old regulatory order and the new one. Consequently, the legal consciousness that emerges from these encounters is distinct: it marks moments when particular norms and practices must be left behind, and others embraced. Analytically, mapping legal consciousness during in-between moments of legal change, which I refer to as \u2018liminal legal consciousness\u2019, can reveal where authority and legitimacy gaps exist, and why. It can also show who stands to lose and who stands to gain when one normative order replaces another. For those interested in legal change, liminal legal consciousness can indicate the trajectory of a legal reform. Mapping how people engage with and relate to the plural normative orders that surround them reveals their relational, structurally conditioned, and temporal agency. These moments of flux reveal how power, authority, legitimacy and norms are reassigned, and how those at the bottom are actively involved in the construction of legality. The legality that emerges in such moments is transitional, in which the ordinary predicates of law do not apply.<\/p>\n The experiences of Timorese legal professionals resonate far beyond Timor-Leste. The strategies they adopt to adapt to legal change reveal patterns in how law and legality are actively contested, shaped, and enacted during moments of transition in societies undergoing transformative change.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n .<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This post summarises the presentation delivered as part of the Legal Consciousness in Context stream, convened by Naomi Creutzfeldt, Fanni Gyurko and Stine\u00a0Piilgaard Porner … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86077,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=727"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":734,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions\/734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/files\/2026\/04\/Liminal-legal-field-sketch.png\")
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