73 CHAPTER 5 SOVEREIGN IMAGES AND CONTESTED JURISDICTIONS: LEGAL PERSONHOOD IN BRITISH COLUMBIA COLONIAL LAW AND THROUGH THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS Matthew P. Unger ABSTRACT Law requires translations in order to make the mundane world legible to the legal sphere. This translation requires transposing an infnite landscape of ethi- cal possibilities into a set number of categories, modes of speech, reasoning, and histories. The body represents both a challenge to this translation while illuminating the historical contingency of the contaminants that ineluctably shape law’s responsiveness. This chapter is concerned with the way the fg- ure of the body in law acts as a kind of absent presence through the writ of habeas corpus, what Roberto Esposito (2015) calls ‘the silent mechanism that facilitates the passage from one mechanism to another through the chain of symbols engendered by its very presence’. The author would like to trace this chain of symbols which permits the passage from differing legal mechanisms through the history of the writ of habeas corpus to examine how it served as one vehicle through which law established predominance in Colonial British Columbia. Through British Columbia colonial legal history, this chapter will examine how Habeas corpus was used to more than merely seize jurisdiction Interrupting the Legal Person Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 87B, 73–86 Copyright © 2022 by Matthew P. Unger Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-43372022000087B005