Fleshing out Law: Embodied Encounters and the Material Geographies of Legal Space

ABSTRACT This paper explores how legality is made material, affective and meaningful through the human body. Drawing on courtroom ethnography conducted in German District Courts—particularly in cases of eviction and housing insecurity—it examines how legality emerges not only through texts and rulings but through bodily presence, sensory atmospheres and everyday encounters. Grounded in feminist legal geography and affect theory and building on the concepts of encounter and slow violence, the paper develops a conceptual framework around three interrelated modalities of legal embodiment: appearing, suspending and filtering. These modalities illuminate how bodies both absorb and resist legal authority—not passively, but through subtle acts of endurance, adjustment and refusal. By tracing the mundane yet charged practices of waiting, moving and being seen, this article argues for a more embodied approach to legal geography—one that takes seriously how law is enacted, lived and contested through flesh, posture and breath.