Questions of jurisdiction

Questions of jurisdiction have been central to Western legal traditions, yet finding a place within jurisprudence and the philosophy of law to pose such questions has not been obvious. By contrast, the practice of the law is preoccupied with questions of jurisdiction and the arrangements of the authority to judge in matters of law. Despite this, the work of practitioners lacks anything but the ‘thinnest’ of descriptive accounts of what it means to engage with questions of jurisdiction. It is as if legal thought cannot, or can no longer, articulate the terms of its own existence. To introduce Jurisprudence of Jurisdiction, this chapter returns to some of the central topics of jurisdiction in order to investigate the modes or manner of coming into law and of being with law.