This book takes its cue from the observation that jurisdiction - as the speech of law - articulates or proclaims law. Without jurisdiction the law would be speechless, without authority and authorisation. So too would be critics who approach the law or want to live lawfully. As a field of legal knowledge and legal practice, jurisdiction is concerned with the modes of authority and the manner of the authorisation of law. It encompasses the broadest questions of the authority and the founding of legal order as well as the minutest detail of the ordering of the business of the administration and adjudication of justice. It gives us both the point of articulation of law and the technological means of the expression of law. It gives us too, the understanding of the limits of the authority of law, as well as the resources for engaging with the plurality of laws, and the means of engaging in lawful behaviour. A critical approach to law through the forms of authority and action in law provides a means of engaging with the quality of relations created and maintained through law and a means of taking responsibility for the practices of jurisdiction (and what is done in the name of the law).

This book provides a critical, and historically grounded, elaboration of the key themes of jurisdiction. It does so by offering students and scholars of law a form of critical engagement with the technologies, devices and forms of jurisdictional ordering. It shows how the common has authorised legal relations and bound persons, places, and events to the body of law. It offers a number of resources and engagements of jurisdiction on the basis that a jurisprudence of jurisdiction, if it is anything, engages forms of human relation.

Contents

Introduction; The Forms of Jurisdiction; Authority and Authorisation: Sovereignty, Territory, Jurisdiction; Technologies of Jurisdiction; Personal Jurisdiction and Legal Persons: The End of Life; Jurisdictional Encounters and the Meeting of Laws; Jurisdiction, Ev the International; Conclusions: Responsibility and the Forms of Law.

Author Bio

Dr Shaunnagh Dorsett is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney. She writes at the intersections of legal history, native title and jurisprudence. Her most recent book is Shaunnagh Dorsett, Ian Hunter (eds) Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (NY Palgrave Macmillan 2010).

Shaun McVeigh is an Associate Professor at the Melbourne Law School , University of Melbourne. He has research interests in the fields of jurisprudence, legal ethics and health care. He is editor of the book Jurisprudence of Jurisdiction (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007).