Sovereign Images and Contested Jurisdictions: Legal Personhood in British Columbia Colonial Law and through the Writ of Habeas Corpus

Abstract

Law requires translations in order to make the mundane world legible to the legal sphere. This translation requires transposing an infinite landscape of ethical possibilities into a set number of categories, modes of speech, reasoning, and histories. The body represents both a challenge to this translation while illuminating the historical contingency of the contaminants that ineluctably shape law’s responsiveness. This chapter is concerned with the way the figure of the body in law acts as a kind of absent presence through the writ of habeas corpus, what Roberto Esposito (2015) calls ‘the silent mechanism that facilitates the passage from one mechanism to another through the chain of symbols engendered by its very presence’. The author would like to trace this chain of symbols which permits the passage from differing legal mechanisms through the history of the writ of habeas corpus to examine how it served as one vehicle through which law established predominance in Colonial British Columbia. Through British Columbia colonial legal history, this chapter will examine how Habeas corpus was used to more than merely seize jurisdiction but, more pointedly, to mobilise images of sovereignty to bolster local, contingent, and contextual forms of authority and sovereignty. In the end, the author’s argument will contribute to an understanding of the various mechanisms and discourses that sought to envelope the differing peoples, landscapes, and topographies of British Columbia into a single normative and affective legal atmosphere, as lawmakers sought to distinguish themselves from their southern neighbour’s colonial experience.

Citation

Unger, M.P. (2022), "Sovereign Images and Contested Jurisdictions: Legal Personhood in British Columbia Colonial Law and through the Writ of Habeas Corpus", Sarat, A., Pavlich, G. and Mailey, R. (Ed.) Interrupting the Legal Person (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 87B), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 73-86. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-43372022000087B005