This book analyses the conceptual and concrete relationships between rhythm and law. Rhythm is the unfolding of ordered and regulated movement. Law operates through the ordering and regulation of movement. Adopting a ‘rhythmanalytical’ perspective – which treats natural and social phenomena in terms of their rhythms, repetitions, motions, and movements – this book offers an account of how legal institutions and practices can be theorised and explained in terms of rhythm. It demonstrates how the category of rhythm has jurisprudential significance, from how Plato envisaged the functioning of the city-state, to the operation of the common law, as well as in our relationship to contemporary digital technology. In music, rhythm ‘orders’ the movement of sound, binding together the motions and vibrations of sound in such a way that is neither pure noise nor pure mechanics. In this way, rhythm can be deployed as a concept in the analysis of one of the central purposes of legal institutions
