Chairs
César Vallejo     CESAR.VALLEJO@uexternado.edu.co
Ruvi Ziegler r.ziegler@reading .ac.uk

The workshop aims investigate how time and temporal measures impacts membership and status-based rights in constitutional settings. Temporal borders, consisting in ‘the establishment of deadlines and time limits which impact on migrants’ lives [and…] play a crucial role in regaining control over unruly migration movements’ (Tazzioli 2018) and shifting borders (Shachar 2020), a bordering technique, is aimed at shaping a person’s legal status regardless of an individual’s position at ‘traditional’ borders. Concomitantly, time has direct effect on status- based rights, for instance, of permanent residents viz. temporary residents.

Temporal borders proliferate in law. There are countless legal forms and categories which have a temporal dimension: retroactivity, precedent, revision, prescription, adjournment, deadlines, sunset clauses, time caps, evidentiary statutes of limitations, pre-emption, foreclosure, suspension, ban on excessive delays, waiting periods, compensation rules for loss of time, temporary legislation, and so on. Even ‘eternity clauses’, institutional path-dependency, and constitutional identity and duration are about time. Also, law is not immune from the general velocity of times, social speed or acceleration.

The social phenomenon of the acceleration of time can be observed in many fields in law: the addictive growth of law seen in the accelerated rate at which laws are passed, transformed and repealed, the success of summary and accelerated proceedings, the rapid downgrading of doctrines and the general sense of urgency and necessity that informs urgent measures and states of exceptions. Philosophers and sociologists of time have long stressed that urgency, once a temporality of exception, is now the norm. Yet, constitutional lawyers and jurists seldom rely on well-developed modalities of representing time-related phenomena in the law. The literature on time and law is vast but typically relies on modalities of representing time adopted from elsewhere.

An important attribute of time in law is its malleability. In law, a phenomenon having certain duration may yet be considered a single instantaneous fact for certain purposes (e.g. ‘age of majority’). Unlike the natural clock, legal time can also stop, reverse, and start over. Unlike clock-time that passes impersonally, time in law is also always the time of someone. This matters for its normative evaluation: two years in the middle of a healthy adult’s life differ f rom two formative years in the life of a child.

Reflecting on temporal bordering in constitutional settings sheds light on the subtleties of the relationship between law and power. Agenda-setters and designers of time standards and rules accommodate the interests of some at the expense of others. Time is a valuable good frequently used to transact over power (Cohen 2018). From the laws of time (how we organize our calendars, and set our clocks), a topic that has attracted the attention of reformers and revolutionaries (Hemel & Hamilton 2023), to transitional justice processes, constitutional moments, and the manifold and competing temporalities of law across all of its branches, juridical time poses normative questions of relevance. Juridical time poses challenges for the rule of law and to inclusive democracies, notably in contemporary contexts marked by crises.

We invite submissions pertaining to any of the manifold aspects of this workshop.