Grasping Legal Time

In this novel study, Martijn Stronks shines a light on the ways in which European migration law operates by examining relevant legal processes through the prism of time." Even as he notes that "[t]ime is allegedly the most widely used noun in the English language," Stronks demands that we critically interrogate this commonplace notion - and specifically that we should differentiate between "human time" and "clock time." His contention is that human time is largely overlooked in migration processes, andthat this failure to take account of time as lived experience does a real injustice to migrants. Much of the book is devoted to explicating what the author refers to as "the slithering character of legal time" - which he argues fails to recognize that human time cannot be stopped, that time traveling in actual human time is not possible, and that there is a dissonance between eternal and mortal time. Stronks then makes the case for decentering the place of legal time and giving more attention to human time, noting the countervailing tendency in European law to insist that durable presence in a state's territory gives rise to a claim for inclusion. This, then, is the legal toehold that should allow us to take human time more seriously in the migration realm"--