Jurisdiction in Deleuze: The Expression and Representation of Law

Jurisdiction in Deleuze: The Expression and Representation of Law pursues an emerging interest in the conceptual thematic of jurisdiction within legal studies; as it maintains that an adequate understanding of the power of law requires an attention, not just to the representation of law, but to its expression.

In an age in which the authority to make new laws can been invoked everywhere as a response to changing patterns of social order, the importance of the techniques and technologies through which jurisdiction is produced is self-evident. But theories of legal power in modern jurisprudence have tended to focus upon the problematic of sovereignty and its relation to the origin, foundation and purpose of authority.

The issue of jurisdiction - which continue to order the technical operations of law, the modalities of legal institution and the aesthetics of judgment - has, however, remained largely unaddressed. Drawing upon the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Edward Mussawir provides an analysis of jurisdiction that, combining theoretical and historical commentary with contemporary case studies, focuses on three core subjects: persons, rights and actions.

The fashioning of persons, possessions and procedures of law involves institutional techniques which cannot be reduced to the usual co-ordinates of rational judgment, objectivity or legal subjectivity. And it is in addressing the articulation of these techniques that Jurisdiction: The Expression and Representation of Law provides a new account of law's power: through the development of a jurisprudence of law's expression, rather than its representation.