Anne Bottomley

Self and Subjectivities: Languages of Claim in Property Law

It must be stressed that her work is not a true description of women or femininity, a position that is superior to false, patriarchal conceptions (truth, after all, is engaged in precisely the relation of doubles, or mirror reflections that is the hallmark of phallocentrism). Her aim is quite different: it is to devise a strategic and combative understanding, one whose function is to make explicit what has been excluded or left out of phallocentric images. Unlike truth, whose value is eternal, strategy remains provisional; its relevance and value depend on what it is able to achieve, on its utility in organizing means towards ends.1

What is a building? Documents for the contractual diagramming of design

The common lawyers understanding of land still hovers between a purely material conception of the physical stuff of land and a more cerebral image of land as comprising a co-ordinated set of abstract entitlements. This underlying tension between the physical and the conceptual has imparted a multi-dimensional complexity to the term […]. Kevin Gray and Susan Gray What is a building? To begin to extrapolate our reasons for posing this question, consider the context of ‘Further Reading’, and the supplementary documents this supposes. To those whose profession is dedicated to the design of buildings, and whose professional life is, all too often, beleaguered by impediments threatening the actualisation, the construction, of their design, supplementary documents are not simply footnotes to design but evidence of struggles over design control. Within this trajectory, law is, most frequently, figured as yet another problematic. But consider a rather different trope – one which uses aspects of legal thinking, or rather thinking through law, to re-engage with the idea of ‘a building’ and of ‘design’. Supplementary documents, in this sense, become a ‘supplement’ which we could characterise as an ‘excess’. Documents which before might have been marginalised now become reconstituted as artefacts, evidencing other accounts of the processes of architecture. Legal artefacts related to design and building, which evidence a series of techniques and strategies for diagramming rights and responsibilities, may be deployed to open new perspectives on the question of ‘What is a building?’

Blind stuttering: diagrammatic city

This paper addresses emerging conventions and alternative potentials in the connections, scholarly and otherwise, being developed between law and city. To say ‘between’ is already inaccurate, because we utilise the concept of the diagram to think law and city as a singular, yet multiple, folding. We take on two problems as a consequence: how law and city become established, and the procedures through which they appear as perspectives upon each other. Rather than applying analyses developed for one in the other — that is, rather than seeking to take parts from one site for transference to the other — this paper treats them as diagrammatic intensities that tend to both hinge and envelope one another, whilst avoiding any kind of dialectical relation. The importance of this approach is that it loosens up our thinking of what law is or can be, depriving it of a ‘centre stage’ from which other disciplines (particularly those concerned with aesthetics) can only appear as law’s other, out-law, or blind spot. This kind of centralised thinking of law, both in its formation and in its relations with other disciplines, we refer to as LAW. In contrast, by thinking in terms of folds rather than parts, boundaries, oppositions or syntheses, we are able to begin to diagram law and city. Methodologically, we specify the fold as having three dimensions (flesh, city and cosmos), which pertain to three interrelated facets which together constitute the consistency or duration of the fold. To image and explore these three dimensions, we deploy filmic experiences of the city. The conjunction of film and city is necessitated in our view by the fragmented perspective both share, thereby allowing focus upon the intense singularities of city rather than any notion of city’s essence. What we learn is that law pertains to the partial and contingent and that, rather than seeking to order or foreclose the city, law revels in its folds.