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Misreading And Mobility In Constitutional Texts: A Nineteenth Century Case, Iza Hussin

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article explores the case of the adoption of Southeast Asia's first constitution (Johor, 1895) to articulate a fundamental problem of translation-the ambiguity and multiplicity of law's language. Closer attention to this problem helps raise a number of possibilities for rethinking the relationship between law, language, and mobility: firstly, polyphony, dissonance, and divergence in law's language reveals a plethora of political possibilities, audiences, and actors in the making of law; secondly, these ambiguities and multiplicities are integral to law's mobility; thirdly, rather than transmissions of law from center to periphery, law moves in circulations that are iterative, contingent, and patterned. …