Legal Infrastructures: Towards a Conceptual Framework

Abstract This Article provides the outline for a conceptual framework focusing on legal infrastructures, comprised of socio-material assemblages and entangled legal normativities that both enable and constrain human societies. Section A introduces the growing transdisciplinary field of infrastructural studies, which employs the notion of infrastructure as a tool for analyzing the constitutive relationship between society and essential material structures. It then draws out the analytical conjunction of law and infrastructure in the role ascribed to law within existing applications of infrastructural studies and the nascent engagement with infrastructural theory within the legal discipline itself. Part II develops a conceptual framework on legal infrastructures, outlining three avenues for how thinking infrastructurally may yield new perspectives on the dynamic relationship between law, social practices, and socio-technical materiality; (a) legal infrastructures as socio-material formations that generate societal effects (b) legal infrastructures as schemes of social practice that recursively entangle to produce new configurations, and (c) legal infrastructures as distributing norms across transnational and regime boundaries.