Law’s Materiality: Between Concrete Matters and Abstract Forms, or How Matter Becomes Material

The chapter discusses the current legal scholarship which takes ‘legal materials’ as its objects of analyses. Arguing against an unmediated understanding of matters and materials, it thinks through what are specifically law’s matters in relation to the meaning of legal materiality and differentiates between matter and materiality. The chapter posits a mediated understanding of legal materiality as law’s articulation of its meaning by selectively engaging with concrete matters. Law’s materiality is unruly and unstable because it is continuously realised through interpretive and representational practices, such as texts, spatial orderings and ritualised performances. Law proves to be a recalcitrant and surprising matter which escapes full control.