Combining different their fiction with our sonics is the best way to navigate the law-sound relation.

This is not a niche enterprise. Because all legal thought and practice necessarily takes place in and in relation to sound, an acoustic jurisprudence is as relevant to the law of property, evidence or immigration as the law of genocide, human rights or torts. But this diversity also makes it hard, and indeed undesirable, to offer a road-map in advance. There is no one story here, no single narrative capable of capturing or appraising the law–sound relation as a whole. Nevertheless, the four analytics outlined at the outset of this piece do provide something of a starting point. (1) The soundscape is always also a lawscape. We must attend to the role played by law in the production of our sonic worlds. (2) We can and should read legal texts for what they reveal about law’s sonic imagination: how legal institutions conceive sound from one context to the next. But law doesn’t just regulate sound. Legal practice itself is soundful. So (3) we should equally concern ourselves with the judicial soundscape, both the acoustic features of the courtroom, and the ways in which that environment was constructed, understood and perceived.41 Finally, because law’s conduct is soundful out of court as well as in it, (4) we should also address the many and changing modes of law’s acoustic expression: its juris-diction. In each instance, the necessary attitude is neither purely internal nor external, neither that of apologist nor critic. An acoustic jurisprudence requires both a knowledge of law and a certain distance from it: a matter of walking alongside, an interested listener. The purpose is not to absolve or condemn law then, but to hold legal institutions to account. Life and law are necessarily lived in sound. The wager of an acoustic jurisprudence is that those of us who think and work with law have a responsibility to pay attention.