Welcome to Score!

Thursday 24 March at 10:00-11:30
Score, Stockholm University or Zoom

The Law Multiple? Studying the Materialities and Temporalities of Legal Decision-Making 
 

Abstract
In this lecture, I explore how and emphasis on materialities and temporalities may enrich our understanding of legal decision-making. I argue that this focus, indebted to pragmatist philosophies and science and technology studies, represents a welcome move away from overly abstract accounts of law and legal decision-making. Based on an ethnographic investigation of diverse knowledge claims as they surround legal practices, as well as knowledge claims made within legal practice, I develop an approach to law that treats it as a multiple object that challenges our epistemologies yet sets us in inquisitive motion. 

Bio:
Irene van Oorschot is a postdoctoral researcher who explores practices of knowledges and judgment in various professional settings. In 2021, she published 'The Law Multiple: Judgment and Knowledge in Practice' (Cambridge University Press). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a criminal Court, this monograph mobilizes science and technology studies and pragmatist philosophy to find a way through entangled knowledges claims about, and in, legal practices. Having worked on a variety of topics, she is currently studying knowledge and valuation practices in environmental management. Her Marie Curie IF grant (2021) specifically focuses on the way such practices are reconfigured as a consequence of the push towards 'fostering ecosystem resilience' in such management settings.