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Reframing Colonial Law’s Criminally Accused Persons

George Pavlich (University of Alberta, Canada)

Interrupting the Legal Person

ISBN: 978-1-80262-864-7, eISBN: 978-1-80262-863-0

Publication date: 28 March 2022

Abstract

This chapter studies a political rationale by which colonial law forged socially assigned individuals as criminally accused persons. Focussing on archived documents of a preliminary examination that took place in 1883 in the North West Territories (now Alberta), it highlights how an accused person was moulded as a culpable individual. Arranged by a justice of the peace, and member of the North West Mounted Police, the investigation in this case reveals how colonial law unleashed an individualising force that obscured power relations behind the settlement it aimed to further. The unequal ways in which certain distinctions of person were legally recognised and individualised may be traced to long-standing western uses of social hierarchies as ‘masks’ from which law unequally recognised persons. Challenging such approaches to personhood, the analysis works off Naffine’s ‘legalistic’ ideas of persons as fictions, calling for a retelling of the fictions around accused persons. By pointing out the possibility of accusing relational rather than individual constructions, it concludes with a brief insinuation of legal forms directed at ‘collective persons’, interrupting a key political logic of colonial criminal law with allied promises of social justice beyond colonisation.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges with thanks the insight comments provided through an anonymous review of this chapter.

Citation

Pavlich, G. (2022), "Reframing Colonial Law’s Criminally Accused Persons", Sarat, A., Pavlich, G. and Mailey, R. (Ed.) Interrupting the Legal Person (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 87A), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-43372022000087A001

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022 George Pavlich