Under Pressure

This chapter probes the material and juridical pressures that shape movement, breathability, and power, questioning how law configures the limits of force, fall, and frontier. Moving through historical and contemporary case studies—from Schiller’s diver to Baumgartner’s stratospheric descent and the contested governance of deep-sea and atmospheric spaces—it interrogates how physical states of matter co-constitute legal concepts. Examining how sovereignty extends through pressure, from the cannon-shot rule to the partitioning of air and ocean, it destabilizes law’s assumed solidity. By engaging literature through a matterphorical lens, the chapter also demonstrates how matterphorics can reshape the reading of texts, revealing how forces, pressures, and material entanglements structure meaning. Ultimately, it advocates for a synaesethics of legal thought attuned to the dynamics of force, governance, and differential conditions of falling and rising.