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87A Stud. L. Pol. & Soc'y 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/slps88 and id is 1 raw text is: CHAPTER 1 REFRAMING COLONIAL LAW'S CRIMINALLY ACCUSED PERSONS George Pavlich ABSTRACT This chapter studies a political rationale by which colonial law forged socially assigned individuals as criminally accused persons. Focussing on archived doc- uments of a preliminary examination that took place in 1883 in the North West Territories (now Alberta), it highlights how an accused person was moulded as a culpable individual. Arranged by a justice of the peace, and member of the North West Mounted Police, the investigation in this case reveals how colonial law unleashed an individualising force that obscured power relations behind the settlement it aimed to further. The unequal ways in which certain distinc- tions of person were legally recognised and individualised may be traced to long-standing western uses of social hierarchies as 'masks' from which law unequally recognised persons. Challenging such approaches to personhood, the analysis works off Naffine's 'legalistic' ideas of persons as fictions, calling for a retelling of the fictions around accused persons. By pointing out the possibility of accusing relational rather than individual constructions, it concludes with a brief insinuation of legal forms directed at 'collective persons', interrupting a key political logic of colonial criminal law with allied promises of social justice beyond colonisation. Keywords: Criminal accusation; legal persons; colonial criminalisation; settler-Colonial Law; postcolonial justice; indigenous law Interrupting the Legal Person Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 87A, 1-17 Copyright © 2022 by George Pavlich Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-43372022000087A001 1

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