Law and ANT (and its Kin): Possibilities, Challenges, and Ways Forward

This paper interrogates the contributions that Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has made, and can continue to make, to the critical study of law. Both within its original field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and beyond, ANT has enabled a reimagining of the ‘social’ as relational, heterogeneous and fluid. In turn, it has argued for a renewed attention to materiality in social analysis. For law, such approach is potentially fruitful, significant, and disruptive of a number of assumptions of previous (socio-)legal scholarship. In this paper, I sketch out key elements (and critiques) of ANT, previous efforts to bring ANT into law, and discuss its potential for enhancing understandings of law. At the same time, I argue that ANT in law is best approached with a commitment to care, and to kinship, and in conversation with feminist thinkers, legal ethnographies and the discrete voices of law.