This Article provides the outline for a conceptual framework focusing on legal infrastructures, comprised of socio-material assemblages and entangled legal normativities that both enable and constrain human societies. Section A introduces the growing transdisciplinary field of infrastructural studies, which employs the notion of infrastructure as a tool for analyzing the constitutive relationship between society and essential material structures. It then draws out the analytical conjunction of law and infrastructure in the role ascribed to law within existing applications of infrastructural studies and the nascent engagement with infrastructural theory within the legal discipline itself. Part II develops a conceptual framework on legal infrastructures, outlining three avenues for how thinking infrastructurally may yield new perspectives on the dynamic relationship between law, social practices, and socio-technical materiality; (a) legal infrastructures as socio-material formations that generate societal effects (b) legal infrastructures as schemes of social practice that recursively entangle to produce new configurations, and (c) legal infrastructures as distributing norms across transnational and regime boundaries.

The Economic Community of West African States (“ECOWAS”) has established one of the most comprehensive free movement regimes. By declaring West Africa a borderless region, the organization affirms the right of free movement for all citizens of member states. Nevertheless, significant obstacles to securing this right persist and is particularly prevalent for female migrants. Studies reveal that widespread corruption, border harassment, and bureaucratic inefficiencies restrict female migration opportunities. However, current scholarship inadequately addresses the interrelation between regional mobility law, infrastructures, and female migration. This Article examines the gendered dimensions of access to mobility infrastructures from the perspective of ECOWAS officials. Mobility infrastructures are conceptualized as comprising legal, physical, and technological components that collectively facilitate or restrict movement. The analysis draws on documentary evidence and insights from 19 semi-structured interviews with ECOWAS Commission officials. It shows that access to mobility infrastructures is predominantly determined by embedded gender norms, laws, and practices. By analyzing accounts from officials involved in constructing the free movement regime, the Article provides unique insights into the disparities between institutional intentions, legal frameworks, and mobility trajectories. In doing so, it contributes to research on free movement in West Africa, mobility infrastructures, and the emerging scholarship on legal infrastructures.