The University of California at Berkeley Townsend Working Group on Law and Contemporary Theory hosted this colloquium which examined the the legal materiality of the first and second U.S. presidential executive orders on immigration in April 2017. Various insistences of ‘lawfulness’ had been attributed to the question of whether it was ‘properly drafted’ or not, whilst its effects have been heavily mediated, as well as corporeal. The colloquium sought to explore legality in terms of its material composition and effects rather than legal status (‘is this proper law?’). Such a line of inquiry into textual events and their effects is productive precisely because not all of the important factors are recognisable as matters of and for law: from the lack of legal training of one of the order’s main drafters, to the subsequent ‘guidance’ issued by White House counsel restricting the ban’s application.
A doctrinal legal analysis would consider the constitutional basis of the order and track its interpretation by the judiciary. By contrast, thinking about legal materiality examines the order in greater depth within a broader assemblage of agency: from the inscription of the president’s signature and his performance of displaying the text itself to the public, to the social and political conditions that shape its uptake, to its dissemination through and contestation over social media. The order appears as a co-produced and heavily mediated event, where its mediation not only reflects upon but also acts into legal processes. The effects are multiple and material: from the act of sovereign inscription to its grave biopolitical effects of dividing and disenfranchising the populations that it targets.
The Legal Materiality Network 