Mariana Valverde

Mariana Valverde is professor emerita at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies of the University of Toronto and one of the figures of contemporary sociology of law. Trained in history and philosophy, her work has ranged across the regulation of morality and alcohol, Foucault's theory and the government of everyday life, before arriving at the city, where she has made her most original contribution.

Everyday Law on the Street (2012) is that contribution. For three years she accompanied municipal inspectors, licensing officials and residents' committees in Toronto to see how a diverse city is governed in practice: not with the master plan or the constitution but with bylaws on patios, taxis, noise, fences and food carts, applied case by case by street-level officials. That everyday law, she showed, decides more about who can do what in the city than any grand policy, and often reproduces inequalities nobody decided on.

Chronotopes of Law (2015) proposed analysing law by its scales of time and space, and her later work studies public-private partnerships and urban infrastructure as forms of government. Valverde has been in dialogue with Nicholas Blomley's legal geography and with the idea of seeing like a city, as opposed to seeing like a state, from James Scott. She is a reference for understanding urban governance from below.

One of her sharpest observations is that municipal government runs on old categories, such as nuisance or incompatible use, which regulate activities and appearances rather than people. That logic allows a resident to be treated differently according to the kind of business they run, the hours they work or the look of their premises, without ever naming their origin or class. That is why everyday bylaws can discriminate without any rule saying so, and why they deserve as much study as the grand plan.