LUCY FINCHETT-MADDOCK /// Eminent Domain vs. Immanent Domain: The Law and its Spatial Practices

EMINENT DOMAIN VS. IMMANENT DOMAIN: THE LAW AND ITS SPATIAL PRACTICES
Conversation recorded 

Lucy and I start this conversation around the legal strategies at work in contemporary India. Between the eminent domain, legal reminiscence of the colonial era used by state-backed developers, and the immanent domain that informal settlements constitute for their own survival in the city, we discuss about how law and its spatial practices can be used as political strategies. We also evoke William Burroughs’s fictitious territory of the Interzone as the place of suspension of the law, the thickness of the diagrammatic line designed by legal architects, a liminal space where one can deliberately inhabit, but where others are forced into.

Lucy completed her PhD at Birkbeck College School of Law, her work focusing on the alternative property narratives of ‘social centres’ and how the spaces and their communities created their own form of ‘social centre law’. Lucy continues to work on property, locating adverse possession as a space for the ‘other’ within English land law, aswell as interrogating the temporality of property in ‘limitations’ periods of possession in land. Lucy uses the thermodynamic property ‘entropy’ in relation to law, resistance, aesthetics; to configurations of the spatio-temporality of property and protest; and understandings of complexity, risk and probability in studies of the commons and environmental law. Lucy also writes on the life and works of William S. Burroughs, and the way in which law intersects his life through the themes of disobedience, obedience, naughtiness and the fourth dimension in Burroughs’ ‘interzone’. In August 2011, she wrote a text entitled “Entropy, Law and Funambulism” for The Funambulist Papers series.

WEBSITES:

– http://www.yeoldefinch.com
– http://sussex.academia.edu/LucyFinchettMaddock

QUOTED ARTICLES:

– “Architecture and the Law: An Epistolary Conversation with Dr. Lucy Finchett- Maddock in four letters”
– “William Burroughs and Naughtiness”
– “Entropy, Law and Funambulism” for The Funambulist Papers: Volume 1 (Punctum Books, 2013)

REFERENCES BOOKS:

– Lucy Finchett-Maddock, Protest, Property and the Commons: Performances of Law and Resistance, London: Routledge, 2014. (forthcoming)
– Margaret Davis, Property:  Meanings, Histories, Theories, London: Routledge, 2007.
– William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, New York: Grove Press, 2004.
– William S. Burroughs, Interzone, New York: Viking Press, 1989.
– Willima S. Burroughs, Nova Express, New York; Grove Press, 1964.

SYNTHESIS ARTICLE ON THE FUNAMBULIST:

– “Burroughs’s Interzone as the Space of the Suspended Law Contained in the Thickness of the Line“