Chapter 5 focuses on the material and sensory conditions of Harare’s Magistrates’ Courts at Rotten Row. It specifically examines how human rights lawyers and their clients incorporated the material and sensory conditions in these courts into their courtroom performances, which drew attention to the shortcomings of the courts as spaces in which to the display state authority. While the Magistrates’ Courts were full of spatial and symbolic trademarks that aimed to highlight the power of the law, the political and economic situation in Zimbabwe after 2000 had severely damaged the courts’ material condition. The real and symbolic effects of this material decline undermined law’s authority. For human rights lawyers, these conditions were further indicative of the government’s preoccupation with law’s coercive rather than legitimating utility. Through visual, olfactory and auditory reminders of the horrific conditions in police detention, ZANU-PF demonstrated its control over activists' and lawyers' bodies and minds. Lawyers and their clients, however, also used these sensory dimensions to contest the state's authority. By calling attention to their dirty, damaged and smelly bodies in the dock, lawyers and defendants aimed to expose the decline in moral and professional conduct they observed within Zimbabwe’s judicial and police services.

In the resilience theories, multilevel, cross-scale and polycentric governance approaches represent a governance approach that can match ecological dynamic structures and scales, as well as a structure providing for a diversity of measures. Multilevel and polycentric governance are generally displayed in how societies are governed with dynamic levels, including nested, intertwined contacts, and cooperation among a number of actors and organizations. The legal system is by nature similar to resilience governance structures when it comes to multilevel governance. Law is developed, structured, designed, adopted, and implemented at many different scales and levels in parallel and is often governed by separate authorities or administrative organizations. Law is constituted by nested systems and measures that function in parallel at different geographical and temporal scales. However, in the perspective of matching law with resilience, this feature calls for a review of, e.g., authority, coordination, review, and the implementation in overlapping, polycentric legal systems.

This chapter explores the political aspect of the legal metaphors. The main question is how epistemic authority can be both individual and shared. The key metaphors in this chapter are the political community and the distinction between valid laws and arbitrary decrees. To understand this relationship, Møller considers the way we can conceive of the thinking self as a critical authority. On the political nature of pure reason, Onora O’Neill has provided a groundbreaking analysis, which Møller discusses in detail. The thought-provoking accounts of the legal structure of reason by Susan Meld Shell and Friedrich Kaulbach are also considered. Building on this discussion, Møller shows that the lawful nature of reason is a presupposition of its political use in debates and an enlightened community.