Exploring the Nexus between Time, Law, and Migration

Workshop organized by Patricia Mindus, professor of Philosophy of Law at Uppsala University, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow

Closed to the public.

Presentation

This workshop explores the time, law and migration nexus. As institutional facts, juridical time and migration are related: the UN definition of a migrant is time-based (Andersson 2020). In social sciences and humanities there is a growing body of work on time and migration, but the legal analysis of how time functions in migration and citizenship law only just begun. Much literature on time & migration deals with subjective experience or lived time; some work is on scientifically measured durational time.
We combine social and legal philosophy, citizenship & migration studies and international law to uncover how time is employed as a governance tool, how the stability of status is affected, and what this means for citizenship and asylum in particular. We explore uses of juridical time, i.e. the use of clock-time and other temporal references in the law, and the varying temporalities at play in the law. Reference to time in law is only superficially straightforward. Clock-time units (minutes, etc) are used in law but bent to its needs (MacKaay 1990: 262). E.g. a business day is shorter than 24h. Contrary to clock-time, in law, a period of disqualification may stop the clock, ex tunc invalidity can re-write history. We hypothesize e.g. that temporary stay or permanent residence reflect an “interplay between objectively expected, subjectively intended, and legally prescribed” (Stronks 2021: 24).

The aim of the workshop will be to outline a toolkit of uses of juridical time in relation to migration and of varying temporalities in migration law with a view to work towards a joint collection of essays on the topic and plan a series of conferences on this topic 2024-25.

With the participation of

Patricia Mindus (IEA de Paris)
Rebecca Thorburn Stern (Uppsala)
Martijn Stronks (VU Amsterdam)