European Law Open (2022), 1, 113–125
doi:10.1017/elo.2021.2
DIALOGUE AND DEBATE: SYMPOSIUM ON LEGAL GEOGRAPHY AND EU LAW
Here be Dragons: Legal geography and EU law
Floris de Witte
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Corresponding author. Email: F.E.De-Witte@lse.ac.uk
(Received 13 October 2021; revised 25 November 2021; accepted 25 November 2021)
- Abstract
- This paper sets out a research agenda for EU legal geography. It identifies some central traits to the project of legal geography, a relatively new and increasingly populated interdisciplinary space that links legal studies with geography. While the EU and the project of integration appear to offer particularly rich soil for the legal geographer, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the nature, structure and lived experience of the EU can be explained from a spatial and temporal perspective. For many reasons, as will be elaborated, this is a shame. Most crucially, perhaps, there is a growing realisation in EU studies in general that the authority and legitimacy of the EU depends, more and more, on how it is experienced by its citizens. Legal geography, with its spatial awareness and focus on the way in which space, time and law are co-constituted, offers a lens, language and conceptual framework to fill this void. While EU lawyers have occasionally and haphazardly ventured into the terrain of legal geography, much work is to be done. This could take the form of methodological, empirical, or conceptual work, and would offer a new dimension to existing accounts of European integration and to the central concepts in doctrinal and constitutional work in EU legal studies.
Keywords: legal geography; EU law; interdisciplinary; space; time
1. Legal geography
Legal geography is a relatively new addition to the interdisciplinary catalogue of legal studies. It sits, unsurprisingly, at the intersection of law and geography. This means, essentially, that it is preoccupied with space. It employs a range of different methodologies to understand how law constructs space, and, conversely, how space affects law.[1] These terms require some unpacking. What is meant by ‘space’ is not (only) its metaphysical connotation, but everything through which space manifests itself in our world – whether tangible or not: city streets, infrastructure networks, borders, rivers, forests, migration, wolves and hamsters. The term ‘law’, equally, has a wide connotation for most legal geographers, including statutes, case law, informal legal processes and conventions, but also political and institutional structures involved in lawmaking. In short, legal geographers are interested in how space co-creates law, and how law co-creates space.
The aims of legal geography are, essentially, to make visible how law affects what is around us, and vice versa. Legal scholars might intuitively be most attuned to the former: we know that law has the ability to shape the world in tangible and intangible ways. We also know that law can demarcate spaces for certain functions, or incentivise and sanction specific usage or relations. What we see outside our windows, and how we act in that space, is (also) a product of law. But legal scholars might be less intuitively attuned to how the causal arrow can be reversed:
- ↑ For a good introduction to the field, see I Braverman et al, ‘Introduction: Expanding the Spaces of Law’ in I Braverman et al (eds), The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press 2014).
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
