Perpetual pendulum in law
Résumé
As time progresses, law responds accordingly in ways that spatially confuse the linearity of legality. Rather than a clean line forward, law bounces back and forth with regard to changes in the hermeneutics of the reasonable, the unacceptable, and the expired. Interpreting the evolving world in which we live, law is a pendulum swinging back and forth from interpretation to expansion to normativity. Through fundamental European concepts of property, ownership, and authority, the space between the up and the down of law’s swing is the space in which change occurs. Most recently, the legal parameters reacting to the Covid-19 pandemic swung between governmental and personal regulation, with the social sphere smack dab in the middle when considering mask mandates, social distancing, and related tools to stop the spread of the disease. This chapter seeks to pay attention not only to law’s swing, but to the temporal spatiality of the motion that engenders the up and the down of law to expand, contract, and fundamentally redevelop itself.