Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-nlwjb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-07T19:05:44.610Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Legal Infrastructures: Towards a Conceptual Framework

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2025

William Hamilton Byrne Open the ORCID record for William Hamilton Byrne [Opens in a new window] ,
Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen  and
Nora Stappert Open the ORCID record for Nora Stappert [Opens in a new window]
William Hamilton Byrne*
Affiliation:
MOBILE Center of Excellence for Global Mobility Law, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen
Affiliation:
MOBILE Center of Excellence for Global Mobility Law, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Nora Stappert
Affiliation:
MOBILE Center of Excellence for Global Mobility Law, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
*
Corresponding author: William Hamilton Byrne; Email: william.hamilton.byrne@jur.ku.dk

Abstract

This Article provides the outline for a conceptual framework focusing on legal infrastructures, comprised of socio-material assemblages and entangled legal normativities that both enable and constrain human societies. Section A introduces the growing transdisciplinary field of infrastructural studies, which employs the notion of infrastructure as a tool for analyzing the constitutive relationship between society and essential material structures. It then draws out the analytical conjunction of law and infrastructure in the role ascribed to law within existing applications of infrastructural studies and the nascent engagement with infrastructural theory within the legal discipline itself. Part II develops a conceptual framework on legal infrastructures, outlining three avenues for how thinking infrastructurally may yield new perspectives on the dynamic relationship between law, social practices, and socio-technical materiality; (a) legal infrastructures as socio-material formations that generate societal effects (b) legal infrastructures as schemes of social practice that recursively entangle to produce new configurations, and (c) legal infrastructures as distributing norms across transnational and regime boundaries.

Keywords

InfrastructuresLegal infrastructuresLegal theorySociology of LawInternational law

Information

Type
Article
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 25 , Special Issue 8: Legal Infrastructures , November 2024 , pp. 1229 - 1246
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the German Law Journal

Introduction

The last decades have seen an increasing interest in “infrastructures” as an analytical lens adopted across different disciplines to explore everything from physical assemblages such as rail systems and bordersFootnote 1 to socio-technical structures such as digital information flows,Footnote 2 financial transactionsFootnote 3 or human mobility.Footnote 4 Historically, the term “infrastructure” has been reserved for physical installations and originates from nineteenth-century French civil engineering.Footnote 5 Its modern discursive usage, however, is much broader than this. From historical studies of technical systems such as electric power grids and air traffic control,Footnote 6 to more recent science and technology studies (“STS”) on for example classification standards, and knowledge eco-systems,Footnote 7 scholars have pointed out how infrastructures not only mediate the exchange of people, goods, and ideas across varying scales of space and time, but also represent constitutive realms for human activity that actively “draw people in” and remake the social world through their modalities.Footnote 8 As such, infrastructures have been argued to embody power, or even exercise forms of governing, and consequently their benefits and burdens are not always shared equally.

In this framework Article we explore how the notion of “infrastructures” may advance our understanding of law, its functioning and effects, and the fundamental role that legal regulation plays in shaping society. Notably, within infrastructural studies more broadly, law is rarely foregrounded as a distinct component or type of infrastructure, and at best tends to serve as a background variable.Footnote 9 Recent years, however, has seen a number of scholars take up the call for “thinking infrastructurally” about law and regulatory processes in order to explore themes such as financial markets,Footnote 10 data,Footnote 11 borders,Footnote 12 migration,Footnote 13 security,Footnote 14 development,Footnote 15 and even the nature of international law as such.Footnote 16 This emerging literature further builds on important antecedents in legal anthropology,Footnote 17 Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL),Footnote 18 and global administrative lawFootnote 19 to shed further light on the legal regulation of public infrastructures,Footnote 20 infrastructures as public-private partnerships,Footnote 21 and the public aspects of governance that physical infrastructures exercise in practice.Footnote 22

What unites these works is an appreciation of the purchase of the concept of infrastructure for engaging the relationship between law, materiality, and social practices, merging these elements into a singular analysis.Footnote 23 As Kingsbury and Maisley note, however, “more systematic investigations of how infrastructure and law come together … are only recently expanding.”Footnote 24 In this context, this Article aims to more broadly explore the links between law and infrastructure by positing legal infrastructures as an analytical object in its own right; one that plays a unique, constitutive role in regard to both individuals, their social practices, and the socio-material structures these practices move through. Such a conceptualization of legal infrastructures brings into focus law as a relational technology for coordinating and contesting the socio-material world. It further highlights law’s stratifying impact—between those who can access infrastructures, and those who are restricted or deliberately excluded from its benefits.Footnote 25

To frame our discussion, we outline three possible analytical dimensions for a broader research agenda on legal infrastructures. Our aim is to bring together and add to discussions in law, legal theory, legal sociology, and infrastructural studies on how law infrastructures society, and how society infrastructures law, in a recursive relationship. The primary objective is to develop a more generally applicable research framework for analyzing legal infrastructures, taking international law as our starting point.

The Article proceeds as follows. Section A provides a brief introduction to the concept of “infrastructures” as the term is employed in infrastructural studies and identifies common threads of infrastructures as comprised of material, relational, and distributional elements. Section B moves to outline a conceptual framework for analyzing legal infrastructures by considering the concept through three analytical perspectives: On the macro level, as a socio-material formation, on the micro level, as a scheme of social practice, and on the meso level, as a means to consider how legal infrastructures distribute affects and affordances, with a particular focus on how norms move across boundaries. Section C concludes briefly by pointing to some directions for future research.

A. What Are Infrastructures?

Infrastructural studies is a sprawling field cutting across several disciplines, including science and technology studies (“STS”), anthropology, ethnography, architecture, critical geography, feminist theory, and post-/decolonial studies. Across these literatures, there remains no shared definition of the concept of infrastructures. Indeed, since the concept has blossomed, its contours may have become fuzzier. As Hetherington wryly notes, “[a]cross the humanities and social sciences, infrastructure is suddenly a buzzword of the highest and most obnoxious order.”Footnote 26 Not all scholars, however, consider this to be a weakness. As Harvey and others note, perhaps “this conceptual-empirical proliferation and divergence is just what makes infrastructure so exciting at the present moment.”Footnote 27

As such, the following does not purport to provide an exhaustive review of the literature, instead, it attempts to narrow in on a number of common threads that arise between different theoretical conjunctions. The themes that emerge are: (1) A focus on (socio) materiality, emphasizing the embodying and productive power of objects and built environments; (2) an organizing aspect, underlining infrastructure’s essential role in bringing things and spaces into relation and governing the movement of goods, people, information and money between them; and, relatedly, (3) a distributional affordance, foregrounding the role infrastructures play in granting the benefits of society to some, whilst restricting it for others.

I. Infrastructures are Material

Infrastructural studies has followed through several waves of scholarship—to some extent reflecting a disciplinary trajectory from Marxist historical materialism—to research on the historical and social construction of technology, and now a wider turn towards studying infrastructures in anthropology.Footnote 28 Althusser famously invoked the notion of infrastructure as an object of ethnography, using it to describe the economic base that is the edifice of the superstructure of law and ideology.Footnote 29 The first wave of infrastructural studies consequently focused on historical analyses of large technical systems, such as roads, pipes and railways, exploring among other things the social norms and practices growing from them.Footnote 30 A second wave took a more STS-inspired approach, focusing on the relations that emerge from infrastructural networks.Footnote 31 Finally, recent work in anthropology has adopted a more critical focus on infrastructures as political constructions, which work to create identities but also serve as vehicles for exclusion.Footnote 32

What unites these different streams of research is that infrastructures are perceived as having a significant (socio-)material dimension; that they are built environments as opposed to naturally occurring phenomena.Footnote 33 For Harvey et al., infrastructures are “extended material assemblages.”Footnote 34 For Larkin they are “material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space.”Footnote 35 Hetherington contends they are “the invisible component in an ecology of material relations.”Footnote 36 The concept of materiality employed in these studies tends to emphasize that infrastructures are open, contingent, and porous, thus transcending traditional subject/object and human/non-human dichotomies.Footnote 37 As such, infrastructures cannot be reduced to their material expression, nor should they be seen as just “technical objects;”Footnote 38 rather, they are “woven into the fabric of society” and their ontology derives from an ongoing interaction between the social and material.Footnote 39

This might give the impression that all infrastructures are physical in nature, but their “material” aspect is generally more concerned with their tangible affects rather than their physicality. For instance, a highway infrastructure is embodied in materials—roads, signs, traffic lights—which is materially different to geographical paths in the natural world. However, it also connects these physical elements through particular logics and redirects their flows, thus recalibrating natural forces—speed, time, and so on. A data infrastructure, or the “information super highway,” is quite similarly contained in servers and physical cable and telecommunication networks, but it also enables and structures a host of social engagements that equally have tangible affects.

Scholars have placed different emphases within these relationships. In STS research, infrastructures are often more defined by their networks. They are “[p]ervasive enabling resources in network form,” according to Bowker et al.,Footnote 40 or a “system of substrates” which are “by definition invisible” for Star.Footnote 41 For these scholars, infrastructures typically involve the interactions of different material elements, each with their own agency.Footnote 42 Anthropologists, vice versa, tend to place more emphasis on the social element of infrastructures. For Schwenkel, infrastructures are “social assembl[ies]”Footnote 43 and for Appel et al., they are an “integral and intimate part of daily social life.”Footnote 44 These scholars may agree that materiality and ideology co-produce infrastructures, but often deny that materials hold their own agency.Footnote 45 Similarly, some anthropologists object to the idea that infrastructure’s societal “substrata” can be neatly defined or organized, and point out that defining an infrastructure is itself a “categorical act” that “highlights the epistemological and political commitments involved in selecting what one sees as infrastructural … and what one leaves out.”Footnote 46

II. Infrastructures are Relational

Another common element of infrastructures arising from this literature is that infrastructures are not static, but rather constantly in motion in their internal machinery and relation to the wider world. Movement and change are thus central to their definition, which can be approached through analytical prisms of relationality, scaling, and temporality.

Infrastructures may thus be conceptualized as having a “relational property” Footnote 47—something “become[s an] infrastructure in relation to organized practices.”Footnote 48 For Larkin this element is equally important to their definition—infrastructures are “things and also the relation between things,”Footnote 49 whilst for Appel and others, this demands a “processual view … of infrastructure’s protean forms,” appreciating how infrastructures are “constantly in formation across space and time.”Footnote 50 Others again point out how infrastructures are “doubly relational” in the sense that further relations tend to arise from their inherent complexity, enabling both “internal multiplicity” and outward “connective capacities.”Footnote 51 Think again of the example of the data infrastructures that work to enable other data infrastructures, such as financial markets, but also physical infrastructures like rail networks and indeed highways.

This relational aspect moreover implies a recursive relationship between infrastructures and the making of society; infrastructures are not passive or external to political, economic, social, and cultural spheres, but actively reshape them.Footnote 52 This opens up infrastructural studies to a range of different theoretical perspectives. Some maintain the structuralist heritage of infrastructural studies to focus on infrastructures as sites of class struggle and the material determination of society.Footnote 53 Others focus on the constitutive power of infrastructures as spaces for bio-politics, mediating power/knowledge and thereby exercising forms of governance.Footnote 54 A third approach, which is by now the most dominant, draws insights from praxeology, STS, actor network theory, and material semiotics to pry open infrastructures as “ecolog[ies]”;Footnote 55 “a socio technical phenomena and practice relating technology, actors, and moral orders.”Footnote 56 The common focus across these perspectives is the notion that infrastructures enable certain types of flows between the social and the material.

Within these processes, infrastructures move towards scale. Infrastructures “mediate exchange over distance,” but do not necessarily have to be deep or large.Footnote 57 Thus, as Harvey and her colleagues note, “it is not so much that infrastructures have a scale;” instead, they “generate” scale through the various sites and extensions of infrastructural work, which “produce[s] settings, situations, or systems as large and others as small.”Footnote 58 Infrastructures are thus open-ended and contingent.Footnote 59 They simultaneously work on multiple scales and exercise “scale-making capacities” which continuously affect reconfigurations.Footnote 60 Some scholars perceive this as a “fractal” process where patterns reproduce across scales and relations proliferate rather than emanate from infrastructuring.Footnote 61 We can see this, for instance, in the “internet of things,” which connects devices to wider data infrastructures to not only share things of cultural value, but also impregnate marketing in daily life and thus the circulation of capital.

It follows that these scale-making processes are not necessarily visible. Several scholars emphasize how infrastructures as socio-technical phenomena tend to “recede into the background” which makes it difficult to uncover all of their operations.Footnote 62 This has led scholars to analytically focus on everyday processes of infrastructure maintenance and repair, or on moments of “breakdown,” where visibility is heightened.Footnote 63 More recent work, however, has challenged the idea that infrastructures are necessarily invisible, pointing to the way that some infrastructures—like railroads or electric street lights—were often active symbols of state modernity.Footnote 64 Other scholars have argued that infrastructures become visible at the point of practices and the ways we as humans engage with them: “[A]dapting, tailoring, appropriating, tuning, modifying, tweaking, making, fixing, monitoring, maintaining, repairing, hacking [and] vandalizing.”Footnote 65 Despite this transient nature, it is nevertheless commonly agreed that infrastructures have some degree of “fixity,”Footnote 66 or at least some fixed reference points or “moorings.”Footnote 67 Railways and paved roads are clearly “fixed,” but so are data infrastructures contained not only in servers, but also in human practices. Relatedly, scale-making processes are not necessarily linear. Infrastructures have a significant temporal element both in their development and across the time span of their operation, from their construction to their gradual decay. But infrastructures may also be seen as “building time and temporalities”Footnote 68 through their relational qualities and the ways in which they are experienced. As Star notes, “[o]ne person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty.”Footnote 69 For instance, what might be a linking road for one particularly mobile community, thereby shrinking time and space from their perspective, can also be an impediment for others, such as those engaging in traditional farming practices.

Infrastructures in this sense often project a narrative fixing of otherwise “unstable material and social environments”; making them appear as rational plans for the development of modern society.Footnote 70 Yet, in practice infrastructures often develop based on heterogeneous practices involving only partial knowledge and thus demanding ongoing improvisation and compromises.Footnote 71 The result may just as well produce more rhizomatic patterns of objects and relations, whose formations may clash, remain “out of synch” or leave gaps.Footnote 72 Thus, while infrastructures retain some spatiotemporal fixity and durability, they are thus also constantly evolving.Footnote 73 This processual element means that change is continuous and immanent; infrastructures are always in the making.Footnote 74

III. Infrastructures are Distributional

Third, infrastructures project power and thus have consequences, primarily of a distributional nature. As Harvey and her colleagues note, whilst “anything” can be labelled an infrastructure, “to call something infrastructure has implications in and for the formation of sites of governance.”Footnote 75 Infrastructures can represent state powerFootnote 76 and its extension across time and space,Footnote 77 or the integration of the power of materials and networks. Infrastructures work with and through power, but also actively reconstitute power relations by iteratively repositioning individuals as better or worse off.

This shifts the analytical focus from infrastructures as a product of the social world, to the role of infrastructures in actively structuring societies. For many scholars, the distributional quality means that infrastructures are “critical sites for the distribution of life … politics and polities,” and thus “to govern infrastructure … is to govern the politics of life, with all its inequalities.”Footnote 78 For Kingsbury and Maisley, infrastructures actively create “infrastructural publics,” and by creating publics, they should be normatively orientated towards cardinal values of “publicness,” such as the desirability of preserving human autonomy.Footnote 79 At the very least, infrastructures can be the source, outcome, or conduit for social and political struggles.Footnote 80 Infrastructural projects themselves are thus often subject to contestation and conflict, as for example environmental resistance to the building of new roads or the Occupy movement against the global financial infrastructure, or public interest litigation against social media corporations.

It follows that if “infrastructures distribute power, they are also sites of vulnerability.”Footnote 81 Infrastructures routinely disenfranchise groups and populations from access to trade, healthcare, public transport or social services.Footnote 82 An emerging body of scholarship now approaches these effects through a concept of “infrastructural harm” arising from “antagonism” generated by their formations “across different scales and contexts,” and indeed beyond their normal expected operations.Footnote 83 Critical approaches in infrastructure studies have generally sought to problematize the contradictions arising from the modernist and liberal ideals embodied in infrastructures and their often more heterogeneous and disparate realities. For Bowker and Star, “infrastructural inversion” is an analytical strategy to unpack how infrastructures serve as “generative resource[s]” for the reconfiguration of societies.Footnote 84 Similarly, scholars in anthropology and the humanities have proposed “infrapolitics” as a collective term for the kind of acts that take place offstage or appear unobtrusive, as a means to discern the political struggles and resistance by those who are subjected to or marginalized by infrastructures.Footnote 85

In this part, we have sought to canvass the ontological, epistemological, and critical commitments that emerge from infrastructural studies, both as a way to conceptualize infrastructures and more in terms of how to approach them as a research object. In sum, infrastructures are material, or with a significant material element, which is embedded in society; relational, highlighting their inter-dependent ontology, temporality, and scale-making capacity; and distributional, foregrounding their role in affording or restricting social benefits by creating flow or stoppage. Via these three dimensions, infrastructure emerges as a conceptual lens, or a productive metaphor, for cognizing how elements of the material and the social interact. Empirical studies of infrastructures have been a generative resource for inverting or looking below the surfaces to reveal, for example, an infrastructure’s inner workings. Finally, infrastructural studies provides a critical focus on how infrastructures constitute power, and the sense of ordering that emerges from them. On this basis, we now turn to conceptualizing legal infrastructures by firstly canvassing the interactions between legal scholarship and infrastructural studies before outlining the core elements of our proposed framework.

B. Legal Infrastructures

The concept of legal infrastructures forwarded in this Article is one that conceives of law itself as a form of infrastructure, with the legal comprised of interconnected legal norms, practices, and institutions, and infrastructure as opening up analytical perspectives in regard to law’s materiality, relational qualities and distributional aspects—in line with how the term has been developed in infrastructural studies. In broad terms, legal infrastructures can be thought of as socio-technical platforms that mediate normativity across society. On the one hand, this means that legal infrastructures have a constitutive aspect, in that they actively assemble materials and social practices in a way that alters and orders their mutual relationship. On the other hand, legal infrastructures have a technological aspect in terms of how affordances and qualities arise from law and assemblages of practices and materials are directed to flow—both of which may in turn come to iteratively shape the legal infrastructure.

Somewhat surprisingly, attention to the role of law and legal regulation is largely absent from infrastructural studies. Where it does feature, it is mainly as a background variable or sub-component, rarely subject to substantial analysis. One notable exception is Easterling’s work on “extrastatecraft” and infrastructural spaces, which shows how states actively deregulate special zones in order to attract investments, finance and tourism, with a link to historical legal constructions on colonial trade and anti-piracy.Footnote 86 Law here becomes both a cause and the condition for infrastructure. Another example is Clarke’s work on platform lending, which points to how financial infrastructures are often developed through “regulatory sandboxes,” enabling policymakers to “live tes[t]” new regulatory measures on a more limited scale.Footnote 87 A final and incisive example is Pellandini-Simányi and Vargha’s work on financial market regulation, which draws on actor network theory to argue that law itself can be thought of as an infrastructure and as such exercises a particular type of agency in regard to financial transactions, conveying specific kinds of practices or serving as a “gatekeeper” for which policies and amendments to the legal infrastructure itself can be carried out.Footnote 88

Within the legal discipline, vice versa, infrastructural analysis is only now beginning to take proper foothold. Two principal trajectories may be seen to emerge from this scholarship.Footnote 89 The first might be called a “law of infrastructure” approach, insofar as it focuses on the impact of legal regulation on physical or other socio-material infrastructures in order to examine the ways in which law enables/constrains infrastructural projects and, reversely, how such infrastructures function as “components of regulatory ordering.”Footnote 90 A central antecedent in this regard is law and development studies. Eslava identifies the provision of public infrastructure as foundational to the permeation of international law in local spaces.Footnote 91 Boer and others have similarly shown how law is reproduced in the interactions of public and private actors in the transnational governance of the Mekong River Basin.Footnote 92 Another line of scholarship moves from a more law and society focus to narrow in on the socio-legal elements of infrastructural projects outside of development contexts.Footnote 93 Seminal in this regard is Valverde’s work on the regulatory fields underpinning large-scale infrastructural projects, with a focus on unpacking the legal dimension at different stages of development, for example financing, accreditation, and contracts.Footnote 94

The second approach is more akin to thinking of “law as infrastructure,” with scholarship connecting to insights from the broader field of infrastructural studies to different degrees. Rather than focusing on the impact and regulatory role of physical or other socio-material infrastructures, such an approach instead foregrounds how legal norms, practices and institutions themselves move through physical infrastructures, which is often pictured as a “co-productive” or “co-constitutive” relationship. Within legal theory, this second approach holds important precursors in the structuralist orientation in critical legal studies,Footnote 95 actor network analysis of international law,Footnote 96 and global administrative law’s focus on transnational regulatory ordering.Footnote 97 Cowan has shown how public infrastructures like railroads were integral for the assertion of jurisdiction to support colonialism,Footnote 98 whilst Rodiles sees new but similar transformations taking place with China’s Belt Road Project,Footnote 99 and Ojomo argues that transnational public works enable regional norm diffusion.Footnote 100 Taking a more networked focus, Gordon’s work reveals how legal practice and public infrastructures reciprocally stabilize global time governance.Footnote 101 Linking more explicitly to the themes prevalent in infrastructural studies drawn out above, Sullivan has analyzed global security infrastructures as relational networks,Footnote 102 and van Den Meerssche has explored the distributional impacts of AI-governed migration control.Footnote 103 Further in this vein, Keady-Tabbal and Mann have shown how the confluence of migration control and the search and rescue regime for irregular migrants at sea can serve as infrastructural violence.Footnote 104

However, within this nascent literature emerging from these two approaches, the exact relationship between law and infrastructure still remains unresolved. Some see law as an institutional mechanism that, while constitutive for how infrastructures are built and governed, remains external to infrastructures themselves.Footnote 105 Others argue that law itself is a component of infrastructures.Footnote 106 Vice versa, it has been argued that infrastructures shape how law has developed and continues to operate,Footnote 107 or that the relationship between law and infrastructure is co-constitutive.Footnote 108 We move from these important developments to outline a concept of legal infrastructures with two principal points of departure. First, we conceive legal infrastructures as a form of infrastructure that on the one hand draws on how the concept has been developed in infrastructure studies, but on the other remains distinct from other types of infrastructure through its normative qualities and operation. Second, we argue that infrastructural dynamics are an inherent quality of law itself, due to law’s practically constituted socio-materiality and its distributional implications for persons, goods, and capital. We now turn to unpack both arguments through an exposition of legal infrastructures as (a) socio-technical assemblages; (b) practical enactment; and (c) distributing affordances and qualities.

I. Legal Infrastructures as Social-Technical Formations

A first entry point emphasizes how and with what effects legal infrastructures are materially mediating on the macro level and how then legal infrastructures shape society by assembling materials and practices. As such, the “socio-material” qualities of legal infrastructures emerge as a space of interaction that links legal materiality and practices to distributional processes.Footnote 109

Conceiving legal infrastructures as socio-material assemblages firstly builds from the “new materialist turn” in legal scholarship. This line of scholarship suggests that humans are embedded in socio-material networksFootnote 110 and law is a material formation insofar as it retains certain features “that transcend space and time,”Footnote 111 such as written texts, rituals of performance, and networks of argument.Footnote 112 This line of thinking thus moves from the “old materialist” imperative of exposing law as the “great concealer” of class strugglesFootnote 113 to recognize that law is both autonomous but also part of us.Footnote 114 Materials can also then be seen as implicated in making legal meaning, they are not just “law’s objects.”Footnote 115 As Latour notes:

Law is not made ‘of law’ any more than a gas pipe is made of gas or science of science. On the contrary, it is by means of steel, pipes, regulators, meters, inspectors and control rooms that gas ends up flowing uninterruptedly across Europe; and yet it is well and truly gas that circulates, and not the land, nor steel.Footnote 116

From this perspective, law and society appear indissoluble because law is impregnated in the materiality of all things around us, but law also remains distinct from other forms of societal norms and practices because of its “mode of veridiction specific to law.”Footnote 117 This invites different views on where law’s materiality begins and ends, such as the significance of cultural objects legal artefacts,Footnote 118 forms of performance in (legal) spaces,Footnote 119 its multiplication through a spatially conceived “law-scape”Footnote 120 and through extensions of its “disciplinary architecture.”Footnote 121

This diversity of perspective on law’s material quality has further sparked spirited debate on whether and what it means for law to have agency in this context. For Latour, law is predominantly a linguistic phenomenon that links legality to objects and events through its “regime of enunciation,”Footnote 122 whereas for Pottage, law’s materiality arises when its “raw elements,” texts, institutions, bodies, and the like, come together as “dispositifs”; “assemblages [that] are made up of nothing other that what they assemble.”Footnote 123 Kang and Kendall on the other hand propose that “legal materiality” is a “specific mode of knowledge that transforms certain objects into legal materials in order to deliberate over ‘matters of concern’ to law.”Footnote 124 The perspective that one chooses to adopt will have different analytical consequences for cognizing the role of what we commonly think of as law within a network of materials, and what we may ultimately think of as law’s materialities. Think of, for example, how the law of the sea as a legal materiality long foregrounded economic and security concerns as extensions of the state’s territorial control to its surrounding waters, but environmental concerns have begun to be taken into account more recently through not only law but also new institutions and practices.Footnote 125

The concept of legal infrastructures offers further analytical traction on legal materialist scholarship by offering a fresh perspective on how law infrastructures society.Footnote 126 A legal infrastructural analysis submits that law is not only material but more specifically socio-material because its materiality was created in social processes, for specific purposes, and enables social practices.Footnote 127 Infrastructure studies similarly recognizes this as infrastructure’s relational quality that arises infrastructures are “things and also the relation between things.”Footnote 128 However, infrastructures are further “doubly relational” as their internal complexity recursively and symbiotically generates expansive capacities externally.Footnote 129 Following this line of thought, it can be seen how law assembles the social world.Footnote 130 Law arises from configurations of practices and materials that are structured but also structuring.Footnote 131 Put differently, law has a critical role in shaping processes and relations, but it is also itself a complex set of processes and relations shaped by external factors.Footnote 132 Suchman suggests we might think of an infrastructure (but here read, as law) as like a bridge:

[L]ike an organization, a bridge can be viewed as an arrangement of more and less effectively stabilized material and social relations. Most obviously, of course, the stability of a bridge is a matter of its materiality, based in principles and practices of structural engineering. This material stability is inseparable, however, from the networks of social practice—of design, construction, maintenance and use—that must be put into place and maintained in order to make a bridge-building project possible, and to sustain the resulting artifact over time.Footnote 133

Other scholars have recognized similar dynamics in the co-constitutive relation between law and infrastructure. For Cowan, the infrastructure of colonialism operates by ordering extensions that settle some social relations, but make others more fluid.Footnote 134 For Maisley international institutions circulate legal normativity through aesthetic and architectural forms,Footnote 135 and Quiroga-Villamarín likewise contends that international conference halls function as socio-technical spaces for world ordering.Footnote 136 On a more general level, Kingsbury and Maisley’s theory of infrastructural publics proposes that law intervenes in technical, social and organizational worlds and they too become embedded in legality.Footnote 137 Thus, at a general level, we can see how legal infrastructures are the result of interactions between humans and materials, but their “stabilized material and social relations”Footnote 138 rather than being social or material, they are built environments that enable and constrain human interaction.

Law’s ability to circulate and stabilize configurations of materials and practices is also an exercise of ordering, and this makes legal infrastructures socio-technical platforms. Socio-technical in this context refers to a multitude of assemblages of devices, for instance, court judgments and legal textbooks and routinized legal practices “whose interaction produce empirically observable consequence, that may, in turn, change the infrastructure itself.”Footnote 139 This is a form of social ordering that occurs across different levels, or scales, as things such as “texts, devices, [and] architectures” come together to produce and reproduce certain patterns of social relations.Footnote 140 Legal infrastructures are thus also characterized by their ability to structure processes of circulation. They circulate tangible assets, such as goods, persons, or capital, but also seemingly intangible things, like cultural norms, practices, and ideologies.

This finally entails that legal infrastructures have a distributional effect—they work to afford or create affordances by enabling the space for human agency in the social structures that they move through. Legal infrastructures can then be conceived as “‘sunk’ into” other material, technical, or social structures.Footnote 141 Legal infrastructures play an active role in constituting or restraining power; they embody power, “route, block, challenge, or rework power”Footnote 142 and also in this way create their own “infrastructural publics.”Footnote 143 Take Spijkerboer’s analysis of the global mobility infrastructure where a variety of legal materials—such as visa rules, free movement regimes, and security law—connect with services and physical border and airport structures to enable some people to move near seamlessly, but obstruct mobility for others, thereby reproducing social stratifications.Footnote 144 From this example, it can further be seen how traditional boundaries or scales—whether temporal or geographical—may moreover be challenged by legal infrastructures as they enable “spatially dispersed ‘communities of practice’” to interact through a common platform.Footnote 145 In short, they connect people, ideas, and power through legal technologies of governing.Footnote 146

II. Legal Infrastructures as Practices

A second analytical entry point is conceiving legal infrastructures as schemes of practice. Legal infrastructures do not just “exist” independent of any social engagement with them. Legal norms must be sustained by continued practices that bestows legality to them.Footnote 147 As any other type of infrastructure,Footnote 148 legal infrastructures need be maintained and repaired. A key entry point for studying legal infrastructures is thus how practices (re)produce normative configurations across different spheres of society.

Such an analysis could follow through from an “internal point of view” that relies, at least in part, on doctrinal edifices to map out how different sources of rights and obligations impact a given issue.Footnote 149 However, a crucial benefit of legal infrastructure analysis is precisely its ability to de-center doctrine away from more obvious legal categories, and to zoom out on broader constellations of law and policy. Such configurations can be seen in traditional domains of socio-legal inquiry, as can be seen in for example Charlesworth’s call for an “international law of everyday life”Footnote 150 or Engle Merry’s work on “everyday understandings of the law.”Footnote 151 Apposite concepts such as “epistemic community,”Footnote 152 “interpretative community”Footnote 153 and “community of practice”Footnote 154 may all shed light on different facets of a legal infrastructure such as knowledge, interpretation, and learning processes. However, instead of remaining confined to a focus on how shared practical understandings and knowledge repertoires are created, learned, and contested within such communities, a legal infrastructural analysis adds a particular concern with how normativity is organized and moves across boundaries and communities.

Another starting point for analysis may thus be to ask how legal infrastructures enable norms to be shared, contested, and enacted in a particular dialectic between structures and the social understanding of individuals. For Star, infrastructure “both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of [its] community,”Footnote 155 whilst socio-legal studies similarly casts practices as arranged by heuristics such as the pursuit of forms of capital,Footnote 156 standards of competency,Footnote 157 or intersubjective values.Footnote 158 Gordon’s recent analysis of the infrastructure of global time governance is instructive here in showing how “legal practice works to stabilise expectations, or coordinate expectation horizons within the assemblage, which will condition behaviour in any given site of activity.”Footnote 159 As compared to other types of socio-legal analysis, what an infrastructural analysis contributes in this context is a focus not only on social relations, but equally on the “interweaving layers of [legal-]technical integration”Footnote 160 structuring them, thereby adding a distinct new dimension. Focusing on the “technicalities” of law in this vein moreover brings back attention to formal legal rules and normative content, but in a way that seeks to understand their conjectures with legal practices, actors, ideologies, and pragmatic paradigms.Footnote 161

A legal infrastructure may further be conceived as the product of socio-material practices because they arise from a particular and mutually constitutive relationship between social and material dynamics. This level of analysis sets the concept of legal infrastructures apart from other strands of practice theory, such as Bourdieu-inspired work or community-focused approaches discussed above, as its conception of the “material” emphasizes the productive power of materiality.Footnote 162 For some STS theorists, for example, practice is a “mangle” because it weaves together social, technological, and natural elements, as a dialectic of “de-centered” becoming.Footnote 163 From this perspective, law then no longer necessarily takes priority in ordering, but is deeply embedded in networks where agency is relational, that is, a respective balance of interactions between ontological equals.Footnote 164 John’s analysis of the digitization of international humanitarianism likewise shows how “legality ‘passes outside itself’ and gets transmitted and shaped through a great miscellany of practices and materials.”Footnote 165

Yet, it might also be argued that law remains unique amongst forms of networked activity precisely because it is a normative enterprise. It is inasmuch “moral order” as it is a technology, which also marks its specificity as a form of practice community. As Gutwirth notes, in reference to Latour’s conception of the gas pipe quoted above:

…values never stand alone or move on their own; water and gas need infrastructure–not itself made of water or gas!–to be conveyed, to circulate in a network and to be brought where needed. In the same vein, the values identified (and the singular modes through which they can exist) need to be institutionalised not only in order to be sheltered and to subsist, but also to circulate and move in landscapes where they might be triggered.Footnote 166

A crucial inroad in this regard may be to think of legal infrastructures as an ecology for legality, a “delicate balance of language and practice across communities.”Footnote 167 An ecological understanding underlines that some elements of a network may be more juris-generative than others, serving to underscore law’s fundamental institutional groundings and characteristic hierarchies. For instance, as Star notes, “[s]tudy a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power.”Footnote 168 Overlooking how legal texts are produced, amended, and carried around or electronically transmitted across departments by bureaucrats in their day-to-day practices, may equally overlook a crucial element of how legal meaning is negotiated, reproduced, and transmitted.Footnote 169

III. Legal Infrastructures and Normative Change

Following on from the above, legal infrastructures may finally be thought of distributing affordances and qualities, and legal normative change can result from these movements and machinations. Here, an infrastructural perspective intervenes in debates on how law changes beyond formal mechanisms,Footnote 170 such as treaty negotiations or legislative decisions. As infrastructures “mediate exchange over distance,”Footnote 171 thinking of law as an infrastructure directs our attention to how and with what distributional consequences legal norms, normative meaning, or argumentative techniquesFootnote 172 flow through legal networks and across formal legal regime boundaries, potentially re-modulating them in the process. As such, a focus on legal infrastructures and change decenters an analysis that typically focuses on the functioning of individual legal regimes and their occasional boundary conflicts.Footnote 173 Instead, it sees flows across different legal regimes as systematic and productive, but also prone to political or socio-technical ruptures or instances of infrastructural breakdown.

First, a legal infrastructural analysis provides a lens for making visible how law changes through practices of interpretation. For formalist theories of law, legal change is typically understood as the role of the law applier in cognizing norms, from a succession of higher to lower norms or finding “fit and justification.”Footnote 174 However, it is now generally recognized that much norm change at the internationalFootnote 175 and transnational levelFootnote 176 occurs outside of formal processes and a legal infrastructural analysis offers potential for empirically analyzing these dynamics. International law most obviously changes through judicial interpretation and clarification,Footnote 177 but also via legal interpretations adopted by states or international institutions.Footnote 178 An infrastructural analysis brings attentions to the vehicles through which such interpretations are mediated, such as transnational judicial dialogueFootnote 179 or processes of soft law.Footnote 180 Take for example the evolution of the principle of non-refoulement, the cornerstone of international refugee law, and a regime never entrusted with a strong international supervisory or adjudicatory mechanism. Yet, the past two decades have seen the principle repeatedly addressed in litigation before regional human rights courts and UN treaty bodies, with far-ranging implications for how the principle is interpreted not only as a matter of human rights but also in respect to the 1951 Refugee Convention.Footnote 181 Far from being supported by state practice, the repeated interaction across regime boundaries may itself be seen as a driver of normative evolution.Footnote 182 This then directs our attention to how legal norms, normative meaning, and legal arguments may flow through legal infrastructures as a consequence of their role in circulating practices and materials, but also ultimately re-modulating the infrastructure itself in the process.

Second, an infrastructural analysis may be directed to how representational practices—that is, practical understandings that constitute social meaning—drive normative change. AnthropologicalFootnote 183 and sociological theoriesFootnote 184 of law-making foreground this conceptualization already by showing how legal meaning converges and stabilizes through interactions amongst groups of actors. These practices are representational because practices produce both the subject and object of interpretation, for instance, in the co-constitutive relation of law, lawyers, and legal practice.Footnote 185 The dynamic quality of law in this context is linked to social agency; it is “coordinated human intentionality formed in partial response to perceptions of a technology’s material agency.”Footnote 186 The interaction of socially accepted rules of interpretation not only constrain but also create the possibility of making new legal arguments, especially when judges are confronted with cases linking different types of normative expertise.Footnote 187 Returning to the example of international refugee and human rights law above, the representational angle helps show how practices of adjudication and national politics have significantly transformed both spheres of law, such that changes in one legal regime may cause mutual impacts in the other.Footnote 188

Third, a legal infrastructural analysis submits that law can change through networks of materials and non-representational practices, that is, through the relational qualities of matter and meaning. Seen from this perspective, “agency is [not conceived of as] an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world,”Footnote 189 as the social and material recursively “interlock” to produce new social and normative configurations.Footnote 190 Sullivan’s notion of infra-legalities thus adopts a “relational process ontology” to examine the ongoing development of law, pointing to how regulatory frameworks and data infrastructure are in constant oscillation.Footnote 191 On a more structural level, Pellandini-Simányi and Vargha similarly point to the dynamic interplay between markets and legal infrastructures.Footnote 192 The ongoing reconfiguration between social and material elements shows how legal infrastructures are also subject to constant maintenance and repair, in ways that may often be intended to retain normative stability but at the same time inevitably drive normative evolution. Vice versa, external events or crises may also more radically transform or lead to breakdowns in the normative operations of a legal infrastructure. Think, for example, of the way that the COVID-19 pandemic not only grounded global air traffic to a halt, but also reconfigured mobility law in a range of areas through the introduction of health law as an overarching concern.Footnote 193

C. Conclusion

In this Article, we have outlined a conceptual framework for focusing on legal infrastructures. Against the backdrop of a so far only nascent engagement of legal scholarship with infrastructural studies, we have forwarded a concept of legal infrastructures as socio-technical platforms that mediate normativity across society. Legal infrastructures thereby not only have constitutive effects, as they interrelate materials and practices in new ways, they also shape the flow of normative meaning through their technological dimension.

We have argued that legal infrastructures comprise, at least in some respects, a form of infrastructure that is different from other infrastructures due to their specifically legal forms of normative ambition and practical engagement. They exert infrastructuring effects that are specific to law, especially in regard to their distributional consequences. To unpack these aspects further, including their added value vis-à-vis other approaches in legal studies, we have outlined different ways of approaching legal infrastructure’s socio-technical aspects, their practical enactment, and how they enabled norms to move both within, across, and beyond society. However, our preceding discussion also sought to outline how there is not just one way of approaching legal infrastructures. Notably, approaches might differ in whether they take doctrinal configurations as enacted through legal practices as a starting point, a more macro perspective on legal infrastructure’s structuring effects, or a view that cognizes legal infrastructures primarily as relational networks.

The purchase of a legal infrastructural analysis may moreover be leveraged for different purposes. In our view, it opens up two types of research avenues in particular. On the one hand, from a critical perspective, the focus on legal infrastructure’s distributional consequences may raise different types of normative debates, for example on whose concerns are taken for granted and whose are marginalized as legal meaning and outcomes are negotiated across different legal regimes and scales of analysis. On the other hand, a legal infrastructural analysis provides a different perspective to fiercely contested debates in legal theory, such as on the relative autonomy of law and what, if anything, makes law a system, as well as more specialized debates, for instance, on how law is applied, enacted, circulated, and enforced. Here, thinking of law as an infrastructure may shed new light on everyday legal work to make visible how normative regimes are interconnected, reproduced, contested, and maintained; how they constrain and enable processes of circulation; and how law’s content may be changed as a result.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank participants at the Legal Infrastructures workshop held at the University of Copenhagen, September 2023, participants of the University of Copenhagen Research Group on Advanced Legal Methods, and Fleur Johns, all of which have provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Funding Statement

This research is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation Grant no. DNRF169 and conducted under the auspices of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Global Mobility Law.

Competing Interests

The author declares none.

References

1 See generally Brian Larkin, The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure, 42 Ann. Rev. Anthropology 327 (2013); Susan Leigh Star, The Ethnography of Infrastructure, 43 Am. Behav. Scientist 377 (1999).

2 See generally Geoffrey C. Bowker, Julia Elyachar, Martin Kornberger, Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller, Joanne Randa Nucho, and Neil Pollock, Introduction to Thinking Infrastructures, 62 Rsch. Socio. Orgs. 1 (2019).

3 See generally Chris Clarke, Platform Lending and the Politics of Financial Infrastructures, 26 Rev. Int’l Pol. Econ. 863 (2019).

4 See generally Biao Xiang & Johan Lindquist, Migration Infrastructure, 48 Int’l Migration Rev. 122 (2014).

5 On the conceptual history of the term see Ashley Carse, Keyword: Infrastructure: How a Humble French Engineering Term Shaped the Modern World, in Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion 27 (Penny Harvey et al. eds., 2016).

6 See generally Terry S. Reynolds & Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930, 25 Tech. & Culture 644 (1984).

7 See generally Geoffrey C. Bowker & Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out (2000); Satyendra C. Pandey & Andrew Dutta, Role of Knowledge Infrastructure Capabilities in Knowledge Management, 17 J. Knowledge Mgmt. 435 (2013).

8 Larkin, supra note 1.

9 Star, supra note 1.

10 Léna Pellandini-Simányi & Zsuzsanna Vargha, Legal Infrastructures: How Laws Matter in the Organization of New Markets, 42 Org. Stud. 867 (2021).

11 Fleur Johns, #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (2023).

12 Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, Virtual Borders: International Law and the Elusive Inequalities of Algorithmic Association, 33 Eur. J. Int’l L. 171, 171 (2022).

13 Thomas Spijkerboer, The Global Mobility Infrastructure: Reconceptualising the Externalisation of Migration Control, 20 Eur. J. Migration & L. 452 (2018).

14 Gavin Sullivan, Law, Technology and Data-Driven Security: Infra-Legalities as Method Assemblage, 49 J.L. & Soc’y 31 (2022) [hereinafter Sullivan, Law, Technology and Data-Driven Security]. See also Gavin Sullivan, The Law of the List: UN Counterterrorism Sanctions and the Politics of Global Security Law (2020) [hereinafter Sullivan, The Law of the List].

15 Alejandro Rodiles, Infrastructural Developmentalism and Its Many Types of Global Law: A Comparative Look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, 10 London Rev. Int’l L. 367 (2022).

16 Benedict Kingsbury, Infrastructure and InfraReg: On Rousing the International Law ‘Wizards of Is’, Cambridge Int’l L.J. 171 (2019).

17 Annelise Riles, A New Agenda for the Cultural Study of Law: Taking on the Technicalities, 53 Buff. L. Rev. 973 (2005).

18 See, e.g., Luis Eslava, Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development (2015).

19 See generally Benedict Kingsbury, The Concept of ‘Law’ in Global Administrative Law, 20 Eur. J. Int’l L. 23 (2009).

20 See Mariana Valverde, Infrastructure: New Trajectories in Law (2022).

21 Mariana Valverde, Fleur E. Jones, and Jennifer Raso, Governing Infrastructure in the Age of the “Art of the Deal”: Logics of Governance and Scales of Visibility, 41 Pol. Legal Anthropology Rev. 118 (2018).

22 Benedict Kingsbury & Nahuel Maisley, Infrastructures and Laws: Publics and Publicness, 17 Ann. Rev. L. & Soc. Sci. 353 (2021).

23 Benedict Kingsbury, Introduction to the Symposium on Infrastructuring International Law, 117 Am. J.Int’l L. Unbound 1 (2023).

24 Kingsbury & Maisley, supra note 22, at 354.

25 This element also situates the analysis in a long tradition of legal critique. See generally Paulo Barozzo, Critical Legal Thought: The Case for a Jurisprudence of Distribution, 92 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1043 (2021).

26 Kregg Hetherington, Introduction: Keywords of the Anthropocene, in Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene 1, 6 (Kregg Hetherington ed., 2019).

27 Nor for that matter has it led to “mutual indifference.” See, e.g., Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita, Introduction: Infrastructural Complications, in Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion, supra note 5, at 6.

28 On this evolution see Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards, and Christian Sandvig, Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook, 20 New Media & Soc’y 293 (2016). See also Jörg Niewöhner, Infrastructure, Oxford Rsch. Encyc. Anthropology (2022) https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.128.

29 See generally Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970).

30 See generally Renate Mayntz & Thomas Hughes, The Development of Large Technical Systems (1989).

31 See generally Geoffrey C. Bowker, Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940 (1994); Star, supra note 1.

32 Larkin, supra note 1; Soumhya Venkatesan, Laura Bear, Penny Harvey, Sian Lazar, Laura Rival, and AbdouMaliq Simone, Attention to Infrastructure Offers a Welcome Reconfiguration of Anthropological Approaches to the Political, 38 Critique Anthropology 3 (2018).

33 This is an observation similarly made by Kingsbury and Maisley in their distillation of the wider literature. See Kingsbury & Maisley, supra note 22, at 355.

34 Harvey et al., supra note 27, at 5.

35 Larkin, supra note 1, at 327.

36 Kregg Hetherington, Surveying the Future Perfect: Anthropology, Development and the Promise of Infrastructure, in Infrastructures and Social Complexity, supra note 5, at 41.

37 See, e.g., Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan, and Thomas Nail, What is New Materialism?, 24 Angelaki 111 (2019) (discussing the distinctions and continuities between old and new materialisms).

38 See Harvey et al., supra note 27; Niewöhner, supra note 28, at 1; Larkin, supra note 1, at 333.

39 Carse, supra note 5, at 35.

40 Geoffrey C. Bowker, Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, and David Ribes, Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment, in International Handbook of Internet Research 98 (2010), at 98 (emphasized in original).

41 Star, supra note 1, at 380.

42 See the discussion in Venkatesan et al., Attention to Infrastructure, supra note 32.

43 Christina Schwenkel, The Current Never Stops: Intimacies of Energy Infrastructure in Vietnam, in The Promise of Infrastructure 102, 115 (Nikhil Anand et al. eds., 2018, emphasized in original).

44 Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta, Introduction: Temporality, Politics and the Promise of Infrastructure, in The Promise of Infrastructure 1, 6 (Nikhil Anand et al. eds., 2018). Some anthropologists, however, equally centerstage the physical element of infrastructures, such as in Larkin’s aesthetic politics. See Larkin supra note 1.

45 Appel et al., supra note 44; Larkin, supra note 1.

46 Larkin, supra note 1, at 329–30.

47 Susan Leigh Star & Karen Ruhleder, Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces, 7 Info. Sys. Rsch. 111 (1996), at 113 (emphasis added).

48 Star, supra note 1, at 380. See also Kingsbury & Maisley, supra note, 22, at 356.

49 Larkin, supra note 1, at 329.

50 Appel et al., supra note 44, at 12, 18. See also Paul N. Edwards, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Steven J. Jackson, and Robin Williams, Introduction: An Agenda for Infrastructure Studies, 10 J. Ass’n for Info. Sys. 364, 364 (2009).

51 Harvey et al., supra note 27, at 5; Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Kristin Eva Veel, and Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Infrapolitics, Archival infrastructures and Digital Reparative Practices, in Feminist Digital Humanities: Interventions in Praxis (2024).

52 Id.

53 The spirit of this line of thinking is not necessarily outmoded, but rather seems to be less common in current literature. See, e.g., Niewöhner, supra note 28.

54 See, e.g., Stephen J Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (2011).

55 See Star, supra note 1, at 379; Star & Ruhleder, supra note 47.

56 Niewöhner, supra note 28, at 5.

57 Larkin, supra note 1, at 330.

58 Harvey et al., supra note 27, at 16–17 (emphasized in original).

59 Edwards, supra note 50.

60 Harvey et al., supra note 27, at 1.

61 Casper B. Jensen, Infrastructural Fractals: Revisiting the Micro-Macro Distinction in Social Theory, 25 ENV’T & PLAN. D: SOC’Y & SPACE 832, 832 (2007).

62 Andreas Folkers, Existential Provisions: The Technopolitics of Public Infrastructure, 33 Env’t & Plan. D: Soc’y & Space 855, 856 (2017).

63 Star, supra note 1, at 382; Bowker, supra note 31. See also Stephen Graham & Nigel Thrift, Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance, 24 Theory, Culture & Soc’y 10, 10 (2007).

64 Larkin, supra note 1.

65 Helena Karasti & Jeanette Blomberg, Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically, 27 Comput. Supported Coop. Work 233, 240 (2018).

66 Kingsbury & Maisley, supra note 22, at 356–57.

67 Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings, 1 Mobilities 1 (2006).

68 Hannah Appel, Infrastructural Time, in The Promise of Infrastructure (Nikhil Anand et al. eds., 2018), at 44 (emphasized in original).

69 Star, supra note 1, at 380.

70 See especially Penny Harvey & Hannah Knox, The Enchantments of Infrastructure, 7 Mobilities 521, 521 (2012).

71 Id.; Bowker, supra note 31.

72 Harvey et al., supra note 27, at 8.

73 Kingsbury & Maisley, supra note 22.

74 Bowker & Star, supra note 7.

75 Harvey et al., supra note 27, at 7.

76 Michael Mann, The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results, 25 Eur. J. Socio. 185 (1998).

77 See Penny Harvey, The Topological Quality of Infrastructural Relation: An Ethnographic Approach, 29 Theory, Culture, & Soc’y 76, 76 (2012).

78 Appel et al., supra note 44, at 21.

79 Kingsbury & Maisley, supra note 22.

80 Bowker & Star, supra note 7.

81 Appel et al., supra note 44, at 29.

82 See, e.g., Harvey et al., supra note 27; Robert Stock, Broken Elevators, Temporalities of Breakdown, and Open Data: How Wheelchair Mobility, Social Media Activism and Situated Knowledge Negotiate Public Transport Systems, 18 Mobilities 132, 132 (2023).

83 Yannis Kallianos, Alexander Dunlap, and Dimitris Dalakoglou, Introducing Infrastructural Harm: Rethinking Moral Entanglements, Spatio-temporal Dynamics, and Resistance(s), 20 Globalizations 829, 829 (2022).

84 Bowker & Star, supra note 7, at 34–37; Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Infrastructural Inversion as a Generative Resource in Digital Scholarship, 24 Sci. & Culture 1 (2015).

85 The term itself was coined by James C. Scott, who did not write on infrastructures but it has become central in infrastructure studies. See generally James C Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts (1990). See also Guillaume Marche, Why Infrapolitics Matters, 131 Revue française d’études américaines 3 (2012).

86 See generally Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014).

87 Clarke, supra note 3, at 875.

88 Pellandini-Simányi & Vargha, supra note 10.

89 In legal scholarship, the term “legal infrastructure” is occasionally used as a shorthand to describe a legal framework, or “the socially available set of legal materials that . . . actors can use to help govern relationships,” but this use does not refer to infrastructural studies. See generally Gillian K. Hadfield, Law for a Flat World: Legal Infrastructure and the New Economy, 1 (2010).

90 Kingsbury, supra note 23, at 1.

91 Eslava, supra note 18.

92 See Ben Boer, Philip Hirsch, Fleur Johns, Ben Saul, and Natalia Scurrah, The Mekong: A Socio-Legal Approach to River Basin Development (2016).

93 Valverde et al., supra note 21.

94 Valverde, supra note 20.

95 David Kennedy, Critical Theory, Structuralism and Contemporary Legal Scholarship, 21 New Eng. L. Rev. 209 (1985).

96 Riles, supra note 17.

97 See Megan Donaldson & Benedict Kingsbury, Ersatz Normativity or Public Law in Global Governance: The Hard Case of International Prescriptions for National Infrastructure Regulation, 14 Chi. J. Int’l L. 1, 1 (2013).

98 Deborah Cowen, Law as Infrastructure of Colonial Space: Sketches from Turtle Island, 117 Am. J. Int’l L. Unbound 5 (2023).

99 Rodiles, supra note 15.

100 Edefe Ojomo, International Law and Regional Electricity Infrastructure: The West African Power Pool, 117 Am. J. Int’l L. Unbound 16 (2023).

101 Geoff Gordon, Engaging an Infrastructure of Time Production with International Law, 9 London Rev. Int’l L. 319 (2021).

102 Sullivan, Law, Technology, and Data-Driven Security, supra note 14.

103 Van Den Meerssche, supra note 12.

104 Niamh Keady-Tabbal & Itamar Mann, Weaponizing Rescue: Law and the Materiality of Migration Management in the Aegean, 36 Leiden J. Int’l L. 61 (2022).

105 Eslava, supra note 18; Ojomo, supra note 100.

106 Gordon, supra note 101; Spijkerboer, supra note 13.

107 Kingsbury & Maisley, supra note 22.

108 Gordon, supra note 101; Cowen, supra note 98.

109 On the distinctions between material and social-material in STS, see Paul M. Leonardi, Materiality, Sociomateriality, and Socio-Technical Systems: What Do These Terms Mean? How Are They Related? Do We Need Them?, in Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World 25 (Paul M. Leonardi et al. eds., 2012).

110 Id.

111 Id., at 24.

112 Hyo Yoon Kang, Law’s Materiality: Between Concrete Matters and Abstract Forms, in Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory (Andreas Philipopoulos-Mihalopoulos ed., 2019).

113 Daniel Mathews & Scott Veitch, The Limits of Critique and the Forces of Law, 27 Law and Critique 349, 354 (2017) (quoting Emilios Christodoulidis, Law and Reflexive Politics xiii (Francisco Laporta et al. eds., 1998)).

114 Jessie Hohmann, Diffuse Subjects and Dispersed Power: New Materialist Insights and Cautionary Lessons for international Law, 34 Leiden J. Int’l L. 585 (2021).

115 Hyo Yoon Kang & Sara Kendall, Legal Materiality, in The Oxford Handbook of Law and the Humanities 20, 22 (Simon Stern et al. eds., 2019).

116 Bruno Latour, Making the Law: An Ethnography of the Counseil d’Etat (2009), at 212.

117 Hyo Yoon Kang & Sara Kendall, Introduction, 23 Law, Text, and Culture 1, 6 (2019).

118 Jessie Hoffman & Daniel Joyce, International Law’s Objects (2018).

119 See, e.g., Miriam B. McKenna, Designing for International Law: The Architecture of International Organizations 1922–1952, 34 Leiden J. Int’l L. 1, 1 (2020).

120 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Spatial justice: Body, lawscape, atmosphere (2015).

121 Kyle McGee, Bruno Latour: The Normativity of Networks (2014), at 168.

122 Alain Pottage, The Materiality of What?, 39 J.L. & Soc’y 167, 169–70 (2012).

123 Id., at 170, 181.

124 Kang & Kendall, supra note 117, at 5.

125 See, e.g., Christian Bueger & Felix Mallin, Blue Paradigms: Understanding the Intellectual Revolution in Ocean Politics, 99 Int’l Affs. 1719 (2023).

126 Latourian informed legal scholarship has notably been criticized for being excessively concerned with established legal networks. See Pottage, supra note 122. It has also been criticized for sacrificing reflexive perspectives on law’s distributional tendencies. See Hohmann, supra note 114.

127 Leonardi, supra note 109.

128 Larkin, supra note 1, at 329.

129 Harvey et al., supra note 27, at 6.

130 Leonardi, supra note 109.

131 Cf. Wanda J. Orlikowski, Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations, 11 Org. Sci. 404 (2000).

132 Cf. Bueger & Mallin, supra note 125.

133 Lucy Suchman, Organizing Alignment: A Case of Bridge-Building, 7 Org. 311, 316 (2000).

134 Cowen, supra note 98.

135 Nahuel Maisley, The Infrastructure of International Law-Making: How Buildings Shape the Publicness of the Global Law-Making System, 117 Am. J. Int’l L. Unbound 21 (2023).

136 Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, Staging Grounds: Dialectics of the Spectacular and the Infrastructural in International Conference-Hosting, 11 London Rev. Int’l L. 349 (2023).

137 Kingsbury & Maisley, supra note 22.

138 Suchman, supra note 133, at 316.

139 Koray Caliskan, Data Money: The Socio-Technical Infrastructure of Cryptocurrency Blockchains, 49 Econ. & Soc’y 540, 543, (2020). In Leonard’s terms , this element recognizes a “recursive [...] shaping of abstract social constructs and a technical infrastructure” and this “includes technology’s materiality and people’s localized responses to it.” Leonardi, supra note 109, at 42.

140 John Law, Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity, 5 Sys. Prac. 379, 379 (1992).

141 Star & Ruhleder, supra note 47, at 113. The relationship between “structure” and “infrastructure” in contemporary law and infrastructure studies is under-theorized—largely because actor-network analysis is more ethnographical than sociological. But for a recent attempt, see Bueger & Mallin, supra note 125. See also Carse, supra note 5 (discussing the etymological genesis of the distinction); Althusser, supra note 29.

142 Marieke de Goede & Carola Westermeier, Infrastructural Geopolitics, 66 Int’l Stud. Q. 1, 2 (2022).

143 Kingsbury & Maisley, supra note 22, at 354.

144 Spijkerboer, supra note 13.

145 Folkers, supra note 62, at 855–56.

146 See Spijkerboer, supra note 13. For a Foucauldian perspective, see also Folkers, supra note 145.

147 See e.g. Jutta Brunnée & Stephen J. Toope, Legitimacy and Legality in International Law: An Interactional Account (2010).

148 See, e.g., Graham & Thrift, supra note 63.

149 For a restatement of Hart’s theory for international law, see Jean d’Aspremont, Formalism and the Sources of International Law: A Theory of the Ascertainment of Legal Rules 1, 11 (2011).

150 Hilary Charlesworth, International Law: A Discipline of Crisis, 65 Mod. L. Rev. 377, 391 (2002).

151 Sally Engle Merry, Everyday Understandings of the Law in Working-Class America, 13 Am. Ethnologist 253, 253 (1986).

152 Peter M. Haas, Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination, 46 Int’l Orgs. 1, 3 (1992).

153 Stanley Fish, Fish v. Fiss, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 1325, 1325 (1984); Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in This Class?, in The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1998).

154 Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity 1, 1 (1998).

155 Star, supra note 1, at 381.

156 Pierre Bourdieu, The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field, 38 Hastings L. J. 805 (1987).

157 Emanuel Adler & Vincent Pouliot, International Practices (2012).

158 See, e.g., Jutta Brunnée & Stephen J. Toope, Legitimacy and Legality in International Law: An Interactional Account (2010).

159 Gordon, supra note 101, at 323.

160 Niewöhner, supra note 28, at 2. See also Pellandini-Simányi & Vargha, supra note 10.

161 Riles, supra note 17.

162 For what they term “infrastructuralism,” see generally Christian Bueger, Tobias Lieberau, Jan Stockbruegger, Theorizing Infrastructures in Global Politics, 67 Int’l Stud. Q. 101 (2023).

163 Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (1995), at 144.

164 Larkin, supra note 1. See also Sullivan, Law, Technology and Data-Driven Security, supra note 14.

165 Johns, supra note 11, at 21. On the making of legality through practices, see also Nikolas Rajkovic, Tanja Aalberts, Thomas Gammelhoft-Hansen, The Power of Legality: Practices of International Law and their Politics (2016).

166 Serge Gutwirth, Providing the Missing Link: Law After Latour’s Passage, in Latour and the Passage of Law 122, 139 (Kyle McGee ed., 2015).

167 Star & Ruhleder, supra note 47, at 117.

168 Star, supra note 1, at 379.

169 Several strands of STS theory have a tradition in showing how social technological formations arise from contestation or the alignment of interests of powerful actors. See, e.g., Michel Callon, Techno-Economic Networks and Irreversibility, in A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination 132 (John Law ed., 1991).

170 See, e.g., Paul F. Diehl & Charlotte Ku, The Dynamics of International Law (2010); Nico Krisch, The Dynamics of International Law Redux, 74 Current Legal Probs. 269 (2021); Joost Pauwelyn et al., Informal International Lawmaking (2012).

171 Larkin, supra note 1, at 330.

172 Jean D’Aspremont, Epistemic Forces in International Law: Foundational Doctrines and Techniques of International Legal Argumentation 177−252 (2015).

173 Margaret A. Young, Regime Interaction in International Law: Facing fragmentation (2012).

174 See, e.g., Ronald Dworkin, Hard Cases, in Taking Rights Seriously (1977).

175 Thomas Kleinlein, Matters of Interpretation: How to Conceptualize and Evaluate Change of Norms and Values in the International Legal Order, 24 KFG Working Paper Series, Berlin Potsdam Rsch. Grp. “The International Rule of Law – Rise or Decline?” 1 (2018).

176 Dana Burchardt, Intertwinement of Legal Spaces in the Transnational Legal Sphere, 30 Leiden J. Int’l L. 305 (2017).

177 Armin von Bogdandy & Ingo Venzke, International Judicial Lawmaking: On Public Authority and Democratic Legitimation in Global Governance (2012).

178 Ingo Venzke, How Interpretation Makes International Law: On Semantic Change and Normative Twists (2012).

179 See, e.g., Harold H. Koh, Transnational Legal Process, 75 Neb. L. Rev. 181 (1996).

180 See, e.g., Informal International Lawmaking (Joost Pauwelyn, Ramses Wessel, Jan Wouters eds., 2012).

181 Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Access to Asylum: International Refugee Law and the Globalisation of Migration Control (2011); Başak Çalı, Cathryn Costello, and Stewart Cunningham, Hard Protection Through Soft Courts? Non-Refoulement Before the United Nations Treaty Bodies, 21 German L. J. 355 (2020).

182 Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen & Mikael Madsen, Regime Entanglement and Interstitial Legal Fields: The Case of Denmark and the Migration-Human Rights Nexus, 40 Nordiques 1 (2021).

183 Riles, supra note 17.

184 Yves Dezalay & Mikael Madsen, The Force of Law and Lawyers: Pierre Bourdieu and the Reflexive Sociology of Law, 8 Ann. Rev. L. & Soc. Sci. 433 (2012).

185 Ingo Venzke, Multidisciplinary Reflections on the Relationship between Professionals and The(ir) International Law, in European Soc’y Int’l L., 2013 5th Research Forum: International Law as a Profession, Conference Paper, Paper No. 4, 2013).

186 Leonardi, supra note 109, at 42.

187 Nora Stappert, Practice Theory and Change in International Law: Theorizing the Development of Legal Meaning Through the Interpretive Practices of International Criminal Courts, 12 Int’l Theory 33 (2023).

188 Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen & Mikael Madsen, supra note 182.

189 Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter, 28 Signs 801, 818 (2003).

190 Paul M. Leonardi, When Flexible Routines Meet Flexible Technologies: Affordance, Constraint, and the Imbrication of Human and Material Agencies, 35 MIS Q. 147, 152 (2011).

191 Sullivan, Law, Technology and Data-Driven Security, supra note 14, at 34.

192 Pellandini-Simányi & Vargha, supra note 10.

193 Florian Hoffmann & Isadora Gonçalves, Border Regimes and Pandemic Law in Time of COVID-19: A View from Brazil, 114 Am. J. Int’l L. Unbound 327, 327 (2020). See generally Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Tendayi Achiume, and Thomas Spijkerboer, Introduction to the Symposium on COVID-19, Global Mobility and International Law, 114 Am. J. Int’l L. Unbound 312 (2020).