Legal Geographies of Immigration Bail: Space, Time and Remote Hearings

Abstract

This thesis explores the legal geographies of immigration bail hearings in the UK. It brings together contemporary developments in digital justice with the methods and critical literatures of legal geography, facilitating an analysis of the transition towards remote hearing formats. In doing so, this thesis furthers our understanding both of some of the tools and concepts developed by legal geography, as well as recent and ongoing changes in digital justice.

This thesis examines a series of research questions. What is the nature of bail hearings as ‘spatio-temporal events’ (Massey 2005: 130) and how do they vary? What happens when technology is added to legal events, and what can legal geography tell us about these processes? And finally, how might technological innovations expand our understandings of space in legal events? I approach these questions by developing four key contact points between legal geography and digital justice developments which map on to four of my empirical chapters: access to justice, time, hearing space and spatial ruptures.

As a result of conducting fieldwork involving a range of hearing formats (from fully in-person to fully remote), the research presented here offers a unique insight into the influence of remoteness on legal events. This thesis uses ethnographies, semi-structured interviews, and Freedom of Information requests to interrogate developments in digital justice and to explore what such developments can tell us about the nature and production of hearing space more broadly. In doing so, I unsettle static notions of law and space and argue that transitions towards the increasing use of remote platforms in courts and tribunals should be understood in the context of hearing spaces that are always under construction, and are fluid, relational and changing.