Michael Murphy (Glasgow Caledonian University; United Nations – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)) has posted The Jurisprudence of the Threshold: Relational Legal Pluralism and the Politics of the Wound on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper develops a new jurisprudential framework, Relational Legal Pluralism (RLP), to explain why contemporary legal systems often fail to hear those most exposed to harm. Across inquiries, complaints procedures, and administrative processes, individuals can speak yet still not appear: their disclosures are registered as data but never bind the forum as reasons. I argue that this failure is not accidental but produced by an underlying admissibility architecture that insulates institutional decision-making from the lived realities it governs. RLP reframes legality around the threshold of co-presence, the moment where exposure meets authority. It diagnoses two core mechanisms of foreclosure: the Shell/Substrate partition, which separates the site of decision from the site of consequence, and the Temporal Cage, which converts urgent present-tense harms into deferred processes of review and ‘lessons learned.’ Against this, the paper proposes a Spatial-Ethical Inversion, drawing on Watsuji Tetsuro concepts of fūdo, aidagara, and kū, to rebuild legality as a practice of present-tense answerability. This inversion grounds the Admissibility Audit, a method for identifying when institutional grammars block uptake of lived experience. Applied to Grenfell Tower and the EU border regime, the audit reveals a recurring architecture of non-appearance and offers a pathway toward a more responsive, relational rule of law.