Lavascape: legal spectacle at Kīlauea

ABSTRACT

In considering the theme “Exploring Legal Discourse: A Sociosemiotic (Re)Construction,” this paper examines the symbolic relationship between law and chaos in the changing landscape of Kīlauea Volcano on Hawai’i Island. The socio-legal dimensions of this relationship provide insight into law’s project of governance in the dynamic natural environment. Most recently, in the summer of 2018, lava spouted and then flowed from Kīlauea in over twenty-four fissures which opened up within two heavily populated residential subdivisions. Law's response to the ensuing chaos provides keen insight into the epistemological positionality of law toward nature. In an attempt to tame this enlivened lavascape of persons and lava, law asserts authority over the spectacle in the areas of sightseeing, access, and mapping. In other words, the legal spectacle of lava eruption is an attempt to jurisdictionally frame the legal imagination of human risk in this dynamic landscape through legal semiotics, legal materiality, and legal topology. However, as this paper will explore, the source of chaos is actually law itself. Attempts to manage chaos are actually attempts to manage human nature as visitation to the erupting volcanic environment is ultimately beyond law's complete control. In a larger sense, this study of Kīlauea's lavascape as a constructed legal spectacle illustrates the phenomenological framing of law's incomplete jurisdiction over kinetic environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Lava
• legal semiotics
• legal geography
• landscape
• environment
• regulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Marusek’s research interests in jurisprudence focus on exploring how law works in everyday life. She has published research articles in the areas of legal semiotics and legal geography in International Journal for the Semiotics of Law; Semiotica; Space and Polity; Law, Culture and the Humanities; Gender, Place, and Culture; Non-Liquet; Social Semiotics; and Law Text Culture. She has guest edited Special Issues with International Journal for the Semiotics of Law and Space and Polity. She is the author of Politics of Parking (Ashgate, 2012) and is under contract with Routledge’s Series Space, Materiality, and the Normative to author two monographs. She is editor of Synesthetic Legalities (Routledge, 2016) and Digesting the Public Sphere (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor of Sensing the Nation’s Law (Springer, 2018) and Street-Level Sovereignty (Lexington, 2017). She has convened the International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law (2015) and guest lectured for the Law and Humanities course at Italy’s Università degli Stidu RomaTre (2016). She is the 2011 recipient of the University of Hawai’i Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and teaches courses in legal geography, constitutive legal theory, and constitutional law.

Notes

1 Fissure 8 is a title generated by convenience and serves as eruptive placeholder until a formal name can be given by Hawaiian elders and community leaders. Pu‘u is the Hawaiian word that refers to volcanic cones that form the following fissuring lava.

2 Henceforth, I will be referring to these two subdivisions collectively as “Leilani Estates”.

3 Initially, I spoke informally in a personal conversation with Representative Chris Todd of the Hawai‘i State Legislature; later, this was further supported by video footage from Senator Kaiali‘i Kehele (Hawaii State Legislature) as posted on “Aerial View of Lava Flow in Leilani Estates, May 29” on the Star Advertiser’s website: http://www.staradvertiser.com/2018/05/29/photo-galleries/aerial-view-lava-flow-leilani-estates-may-29/ (Accessed 17 December 2018).

4 The use of the Hawaiian ‘okina and other punctuation would not have been used by Ford in 1911, so the quote appears here as it would have in 1911.