Trust and the temporalities of law

¹This volume is the result of a conference at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, that marked the transition of the Project Group Legal Pluralism into the Department of Law and Anthropology. As it happened, it was to be the last scientific event for Franz von Benda-Beckmann, who passed away in January 2013. Renisa Mawani, Gerhard Anders, Friederike Stahlmann, and Mariana Valverde participated in the conference but have published or are in the process of publishing their contributions elsewhere. As I draw on their contributions, I shall refer to them in this introduction.

Abstract

With a strong focus on social practices under plural legal conditions, the papers in this volume discuss how people operate within the various temporalities of law. The papers show that the competence to navigate the complex web of temporalities and legal orders is highly unequally distributed. Most papers in this volume testify to the stratifying implications of time when asymmetrically instrumentalised within the context of these social practices. The introduction discusses various classifications of time and argues that are important for analysing law's temporalities in the sense of the temporal validity of law, temporal aspects of legislation, decision making, and of evidence and causation. They serve to clarify that the nature of the problems differs depending on whether they arise from social or specific legal temporalities. The paper suggests studying not only temporalities of law but paying special attention to the temporalities within law. This is followed by a discussion of how law connect past, present and the future, with special attention to memories of the past. While the third section is devoted to problems that arise when law ‘borrows’ the temporalities of other disciplines, the fourth section deals with the contradictions and frictions arising from acceleration and hyperregulation. In the last section of this paper, speculations are made on how the issues analysed in this volume might affect uncertainty, risk and trust in law.

Keywords:

• time
• trust
• legal pluralism
• hyper-regulation

Acknowledgements

I thank Melanie Wiber and Martin Ramstedt for their valuable comments. I also thank Gita Rajan for her careful language editing.

Notes

¹ This volume is the result of a conference at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, that marked the transition of the Project Group Legal Pluralism into the Department of Law and Anthropology. As it happened, it was to be the last scientific event for Franz von Benda-Beckmann, who passed away in January 2013. Renisa Mawani, Gerhard Anders, Friederike Stahlmann, and Mariana Valverde participated in the conference but have published or are in the process of publishing their contributions elsewhere. As I draw on their contributions, I shall refer to them in this introduction.

1 For extensive critiques on these concepts, see e.g. Clammer (1973), Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), Chanock (1985), and Ranger (1983).

2 Also: cyclical time, time zones.

3 I thank Melanie Wiber for suggesting the term “borrowed temporalities”.

4 Quack (2013) argues that soft law may evolve into hard law but that the reverse process also occurs.

5 See Giddens (1984, 1985, 1990) and Harvey (1989).

6 See F. von Benda-Beckmann and K. von Benda-Beckmann (forthcoming, 44–47) for a discussion of “accelerating legal spaces”.

7 For the harmful effects on fisheries management of the persistence of legal concepts such as “maximum sustainable yield” and “open access of the high sea”, see Hey (2012).

8 See Beck (1992, 2006) and Giddens (1991, 2006).

9 See Luhmann (1979, 10), quoted in Barbalet (1996, 82).