A new book by Reader in Law Dr Emily Grabham offers a fresh and lively examination of the relationship between law and time.
In Brewing Legal Times: Things, Form and the Enactment of Law (University of Toronto Press), Dr Grabham draws on perspectives from actor-network theory, feminist theory, and legal anthropology to consider how legal temporalities are ‘brewed’ in UK and Canadian Law. Case studies include debates about ‘progression’ and ‘likelihood’ in the context of HIV law, ‘work-life balance’ in labour law, and ‘transition’ in the context of transgender legal rights.
Dr Grabham argues that human, material, and legal relationships constantly generate new temporalities because of human and nonhuman interactions. She suggests that, by engaging with the creative potential of “things” such as cells, viruses, reports, legal documents, and more, our understanding of law and time is subject to change. In challenging the scholarship on the materiality of time and law, Brewing Legal Times encourages a new understanding of the way in which time is enacted through legal networks.
In addition to law and time, Dr Grabham‘s research areas include labour law, interdisciplinary perspectives on labour and value, and feminist legal theory. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to legal analysis, drawing on methods and perspectives from legal anthropology, feminist theory, science and technology studies, and critical legal theory.
Together with Dr Sian Beynon Jones from the University of York, Dr Grabham co-ordinates the interdisciplinary network Regulating Time: New Perspectives on Regulation, Law and Temporalities. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this network investigates how law and regulation are shaped by dominant concepts of time.