Abstract

Arising from the spatial turn in the social sciences, metaphors and material practices of movement have developed into methodological tools for studying the transitory moments of everyday life. This article explores how socio-legal scholars can use movement as method to trace law in the everyday of civic space. The research draws upon a project that explored how bodies, materials, concepts, and administrative processes are set in motion in the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury, England, where births and deaths are registered on the mezzanine floor of the municipal library, museum, and art gallery. The article teases out some of the challenges of journeying with law, in architectural settings where legal activity has not been explicitly designed for, but where it nonetheless surfaces in fleeting moments. Movement as method, I argue, expands the socio-legal toolkit for examining spaces of law and bureaucracy while challenging assumptions made in socio-legal studies about the buildings typically inhabited by lawyers in the Global North.