The German Law Journal editorial team is enthusiastic to be able to present to you this Special Issue dedicated to ‘Legal Infrastructures’, a concept that has attracted attention in several legal contexts recently, without however being fully spelled out and made accessible to wider debates. Broadly speaking, ‘legal infrastructures’ refer to the socio-material formations that generate legal effects, structure legal relations, and shape the distribution of rights and obligations. Law not only engages with infrastructures—both physical (such as ports, network cables, offshore wind parks, trade fairs, or legal documents) and immaterial (such as knowledge practices, data governance, and digital networks)—but, crucially, it also becomes an infrastructure itself, shaping access to justice, mobility, and other resources.

Through contributions by leading scholars across multiple legal domains, this collection demonstrates how ‘legal infrastructures’ offer a compelling lens through which to explore how law functions in practice—how it is both shaped by and shapes the broader social, political, and economic forces of our time. Guest editors William Hamilton Byrne, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, and Nora Stappert, who have thoughtfully curated this issue, challenge us all, regardless of our fields of work, to think infrastructurally. This approach not only questions conventional legal doctrine but also unsettles longstanding socio-legal assumptions.

Following an introduction that contextualizes legal infrastructures within the broader ‘infrastructural turn’ across social sciences and humanities, Byrne, Gammeltoft-Hansen, and Stappert develop a conceptual framework that articulates legal infrastructures through three dimensions: as socio-material formations, as frameworks of social organization entangled across multiple normative levels, and as mechanisms of distribution that shape access to legal, economic, and political resources.

Next, Jaya Ramji-Nogales examines how political polarization affects the legal infrastructure of the U.S. border, demonstrating how discretionary enforcement, fragmented governance, and opaque decision-making contribute to legal dysfunction. Her work foregrounds infrastructure as an analytical tool to expose structural violence and power asymmetries.

Frédéric Mégret shifts attention to a seemingly mundane but highly consequential aspect of global mobility: the travel visa. He argues that visas constitute a fundamental legal infrastructure that governs movement in ways that are often arbitrary and exclusionary. By tracing their historical development and operational logic, Mégret reveals how these infrastructures reinforce geopolitical hierarchies, racialized exclusions, and economic inequalities.

Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen explore citizenship as a legal infrastructure, one that facilitates mobility and rights access for some while systematically restricting it for others. They highlight citizenship’s role as a critical node within overlapping legal regimes, shaping migration policies, economic entitlements, and global inequalities. Turning to contemporary debates, they examine how dual citizenship and citizenship-by-investment schemes create new stratifications of mobility, disproportionately benefiting economic elites.

Gavin Sullivan and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche critically examine Cerberus, the UK’s emerging algorithmic border infrastructure. Drawing from extensive fieldwork, they reveal how this digital system integrates disparate data sources to facilitate predictive risk assessments, raising sharp concerns about transparency, racial profiling, and algorithmic bias. Their work illustrates how digital infrastructures encode and redefine legal norms, fundamentally reshaping state control and surveillance.

Andrea Jiménez Laurence and Florian F. Hoffmann investigate migration governance infrastructures in Latin America, focusing on how migrants navigate, contest, and reshape these legal frameworks. Through case studies, they illustrate how overlapping domestic, regional, and international legal systems produce both obstacles and opportunities for mobile populations.

Amalie Ravn Weinrich turns to the gendered dimensions of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) free movement regime, analyzing how legal, physical, and technological infrastructures shape and, in many cases, restrict female migration opportunities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with ECOWAS officials, she demonstrates how policy intentions frequently clash with infrastructural constraints, resulting in unequal access to mobility.

Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Itamar Mann examine cruise ships as floating legal infrastructures. They develop a framework that conceptualizes cruise ships as platforms of global capitalism and international legal ordering, operating at the intersection of maritime, labor, and immigration law, and revealing the hidden regulatory mechanisms that sustain the cruise industry.

Mariana Valverde concludes this Special Issue with a reflective piece on the evolution of infrastructural thought in legal scholarship. She revisits her past research on legal and physical infrastructures, tracing the ways in which infrastructural studies have influenced contemporary legal analysis. In this, she critiques traditional assumptions about transparency and democratic accountability in infrastructure governance.

Taken together, these contributions illustrate the many ways in which legal infrastructures shape our world, often remaining invisible until moments of breakdown or contestation. We hope this collection inspires new inquiries into law’s infrastructural dimensions!

As always, happy reading,

Klaas Hendrik Eller
on behalf of the GLJ Editors-in-Chief