Trust and the temporalities of law

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.