Much socio-legal scholarship assumes that even if experiences of law and time differ, people and laws exist within an overarching, shared timeframe. In Brewing Legal Times, Emily Grabham boldly departs from this assumption, drawing on perspectives from actor-network theory, feminist theory, and legal anthropology to advance our understanding of law and time.

Grabham argues that human, material, and legal relationships constantly generate new temporalities because of human and nonhuman interactions. By engaging with the creative potential of "things" such as cells, viruses, reports, legal documents, and more, our understanding of law and time is subject to change. In challenging the scholarship on the materiality of time and law, Brewing Legal Times encourages us to confront the multiple and mundane ways in which time is enacted through legal networks.

Prizes

Winner of Socio-Legal Theory and History Prize awarded by The Socio-Legal Studies Association 2017 (UK)

‘Emily Grabham’s book is path-breaking theorization of regulation and a pioneering methodological demonstration. It delivers insights not only in relation to the author’s chosen examples, but also far beyond – including circumstances in which humans themselves are treated as objects.’

"I was gripped from page to page as if reading a novel, being drawn into the various worlds that Grabham describes and, more so, into the conceptual world which this book creates...This book will be a provocative and generative resource for a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars looking for new ways to understand the worlds which seemingly mundane legal practices create."

Emily Grabham is a Reader in Law at the University of Kent.