Journal of Legal Anthropology

In Oregon, public hearings, participatory workshops, tribal consultations and environmental assessments are shaping debates over the possible emergence of a floating offshore wind industry. At stake is whether such an industry will emerge there and, if so, at what scale (see Kathleen Sullivan, this issue). The question might appear technical, as a matter of turbines, transmission lines and seabed leases. But while it is certainly often framed as political, it is also deeply legal. It concerns how law anticipates, authorises and gives form to a future in which wind and ocean are rendered as resources and in which an emergent form of oceanic industrialisation is made thinkable and governable.

This article examines how the mutable and murky nature of ciénagas resists cartographical and scientific classificatory attempts based on the strict spatial differentiation of land from water. Focusing on the ciénagas of the Magdalena River in Colombia, it traces how nineteenth-century maps and bureaucratic practices attempted to regularise these shifting wetlands, producing enduring forms of cartographic erasure and dispossession. By engaging with murkiness as a methodological approach, the article explores the tension between clarity and muddiness, arguing that the classification of ciénagas is a process deeply entangled with power geometries, property and the capitalist production of nature-associated paradigms of clarity and speed. These frameworks render ciénagas visible only as manageable resources, obscuring their complexity and vitality while displacing the communities whose lives unfold within their fluid ecologies.

Oregonians are entrenched in considering the possibility of developing a floating offshore wind energy industry off their southern coast. I examine the scaling practices of law, and the scaling practices of the federal and state government staffs and their constituents, as people come together to debate their oceanic future. These deeply uneasy discussions have unfolded during a series of legislated public meetings, first with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management taking the lead, and then through a Roadmap Roundtable led by the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development. While everyone supports transitioning to green energy, the meaning of green energy is contested. Scale is at the centre of that contestation: the scale of the potential industry, and of its impacts and benefits. In these scaling exercises different forms of connectivity are posited. Together, scaling and cultural logics of connectivity reveal gaps and constraints in contemporary legal approaches to environmental and infrastructure challenges.

This article analyses how law, state power and urban space are co-produced through struggles over water and electricity in southern Barranquilla, Colombia. Based on ethnographic research (2013–2014) in an unofficial ‘Complaints Office’, it follows two intermediaries, Agustín and Sabas, who call themselves ‘law technicians’ and draft formal complaints and appeals against privatised utilities. Their work (reading bills and meters, assembling evidence, and citing Law 142 and regulator procedures) shows how technical routines materialise the ‘state effect’, making authority appear neutral and distant. Yet these routines are also political sites where residents expose contradictions in tariffing, debt and fraud regimes, and keep cases active as procedural shields against disconnection. Tracing paperwork, devices and case strategies alongside histories of displacement, racism and intimidation, the article argues that legality is assembled through infrastructure and can reproduce inequality as well as enabling everyday resistance and reimagination of rights.

The cities and towns of Papua New Guinea (PNG) are characterised by formal urban centres surrounded by informal settlements occupying land held under customary tenure. Housing in the city centres is expensive and excessively formalised, reproducing colonial-era legal regimes of exclusion; most urbanites consequently live in the settlements. They do so under a variety of extra-legal leasehold agreements with customary landowners who may initiate or terminate these agreements at will. Focused on the city of Lae, this article initiates an enquiry into the polylegality of how people inhabit urban space in PNG. By ‘polylegality’, I aim to convey an infusion of the legal with everyday practices of dwelling. Housing in the settlements is often described as precarious. But for settlement residents, questions of precarity or security are entangled with the immediacy of conducting their relationships within the settlement as strategies of flourishing in the landscape of the city.