This article engages with two aspects of how cartography enabled law and jurisdictional ordering in a specific historical context. First, by interrogating the ways in which the great trigonometrical surveys of the British colonial enterprise and the Atlas of India entrenched “India” as a distinct, coherent, and contiguous geographical entity, this article will demonstrate how an epistemology rooted in a civilising impulse produced the perception of India as a thoroughly refined British legal territory. Second, by engaging with the maps and records of colonial cadastral and revenue surveys, this article will show how maps played a critical role in the visualisation of British Indian territory in terms of police networks. Such a visualisation paved the way for the rationalisation and systematisation of horizontal jurisdictions, with vertically aligned hierarchies, across the territory.

In this paper, I trace the social life of law as it shapes—and is shaped by—quotidian motoring practices in urban India. While laws, rules, and codes that regulate humans and vehicles exist on paper, scholarship on how motorists and state actors understand, interpret, and enact these laws is still scant. In the backdrop of a continued public discourse around road safety, rule-disobedience, infrastructural aspirations, and class inequality in the country, how does law mediate driving (and riding, henceforth) in cities? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, this paper analyses how motorists make sense of traffic law enforcement (with particular focus on speeding) and how these interpretations orient motorists vis-à-vis the everyday state and the city. The material, structural and infrastructural conditions of driving, I ultimately argue, produce situational and contingent relationships to traffic laws and to the state.

Socio-legal studies on legal boundary-crossing provide accounts of how states and individuals negotiate the spatial relation between them in terms of legality/illegality. However, situations which present as both legal and illegal can unfold in ways which escape analytic capture by this polarity, posing a challenge to these approaches. In this paper, I examine examples of personal use of the common corridor by public flat owners in Singapore to test the explanatory power of Hans Lindahl’s concept of a-legality in deepening our understanding of boundary-crossings which take place in Singapore’s public housing blocks. I argue that in these situations, a-legality exposes a social and cultural latitude present in the lived experience of the relation between the social concept of ownership and the legal concept of property which would not be visible through an (il)legality analysis.

Taiwan’s urban data governance reveals how concentrated data control creates spatial power through subtle mechanisms. This article introduces “data hegemony” and “digital enclaves” to examine COVID-19 surveillance in Taipei’s Wanhua district and concert management in Kaohsiung. Wanhua demonstrates coercive data hegemony—comprehensive surveillance under emergency powers that create visible harms (healthcare denial, spatial stigmatisation, and economic losses)—which enables civil society to contest through legal challenges. Kaohsiung demonstrates service-integrated data hegemony—surveillance embedded within service provision delivering genuine improvements (efficient crowd management, optimised facilities, and economic benefits) that foreclose contestation through satisfaction. This framework addresses critical gaps in privacy-centric and state-surveillance approaches by capturing how algorithmic categorisation produces collective spatial effects transcending individual privacy violations, with implications for democratic oversight in digitised cities.

This essay engages with law and geography in urban Asia by working through the topographies and atmospheres of law and criminal justice in Japan. The places we consider are koban (police boxes) and a legal precinct. Koban stretch across the country; the exemplary legal precinct is in Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, a gateway with mist and haze. The essay develops a set of theoretical thresholds through which to address and work through the atmospheric place-making of law and criminal justice in Tokyo’s urban environments. Our approach to relations between law and geography is situated at the crossroads of jurisprudence and humanities, criminology, and urban studies. Its two key considerations are topography and atmospheres, and place-making and its energies and folds. It is argued that topographic atmospheres of law and criminal justice are jurisdictional exercises. The essay is also an experiment in atmospheric writing.

This article discusses the transformation of West Sumatran (Minangkabau) subjectivity-making through legal discourses in the late colonial period. Emphasis is put on the role of Minangkabau elites who adopted such legal discourses from Dutch colonial ethnographers, allowing them to position themselves as mediators between their Sumatran peers and the colonial government and to negotiate themselves towards political power. I argue that legal subjectivities played a dual role in these endeavours; they were developed to re-fashion Minangkabau elites as experts in colonial modernity and to project these new senses of self outwards to a wider public. A flurry of publications, from newspapers to monographs on custom and court manuals, facilitated the proliferation of legal discourses and engaged in multiple types of identity formation underpinned by law. This article investigates the different types of legal subjectivities espoused in these publications and their circumscription of everyday life within the rigidifying parameters of law.

This article examines how courts in a diverse and divided society navigate tensions over a polarized religious issue. The incrementalist approach that defers difficult choices about state and religion through vague compromise has been defended in polities where achieving cohesion proves difficult. This article investigates how the court grapples with incrementalist logic underlying the regulation of interfaith marriage in Indonesia. To mitigate disagreements, the Indonesian Marriage Law has left the legality of interfaith marriage ambiguous and subject to constant negotiation and compromise. This article argues that the Indonesian Constitutional Court has failed to sustain this balance, as the court increasingly leans towards the religious aspect of marriage. Indonesian experience shows the complexities of court interventions on unclear legislative agreements and contentious issues in society. The Court adopted a rigid legal interpretation based on conservative religious views, which not only undermines rights and pluralism, but intensifies tensions and complicates future negotiations.

This article examines how judicial legitimacy in adversarial systems is fundamentally shaped by institutional constraints by arguing that courts inherit legitimacy deficits from investigative, prosecutorial, and post-judicial actors. Rather than viewing legitimacy as court-generated, I introduce the concept of “legitimacy transfer” to explain how deficits at one institutional stage structurally constrain courts’ capacity to generate public trust through their own actions alone. Using Malaysia’s corruption cases as a critical case study, it demonstrates how judicial legitimacy is fundamentally shaped by entire legal process from initial investigations through prosecutorial decisions to post-judicial mechanisms. The analysis reveals how investigative thoroughness, prosecutorial independence, and post-judicial mechanisms like royal pardons or executive clemency might significantly impact public trust in judicial outcomes. This reconceptualization suggests that in adversarial systems, strengthening judicial legitimacy requires a holistic approach addressing the entire legal process rather than focusing only on the court.