meaning through law, to tangible or intangible borders and to the scope of legal regulations.[1] It presupposes an ability to read the biophysical landscape, an awareness of how space affects relations between humans, more-than-humans and other material realities, and how a specific place mediates the ‘dumping’ of law on it.
This leads us to the second characteristic of legal geographers. Legal geographers are interested in the unstable, dynamic or fractious interaction between, on the one hand, the local and specific context where law ‘acts’, and, on the other hand, the necessarily aspatial nature of law itself, which is generated and applicable regardless of specificity. A municipal, national or supranational norm cannot take account of the specific context of all the sites to which it might be applicable. Yet, the specific spatial context will, inevitably, alter the legal norm itself – whether through practical mediation by local administrators, the creation of unintended effects, an inability to achieve the objectives of the norm, or even its de facto misapplication or disapplication by actors faced with that law.[2] This ambivalence is interesting to legal geographers because it allows for an explicit engagement with the reflexive nature of legal geography: space, time and law become intimately intermeshed to the point where causal effects become difficult to disentangle.[3] Does the law create the space or does the space create the law? Only by studying all three dimensions, then, can we truly engage with the normative questions that interest legal geographers.
A third general characteristic of legal geographers lies in their normative approach. While some work by legal geographers has focused on empirical or descriptive projects, the majority understand the discipline as carrying an implicit commitment to make visible, dislocate or destabilise instances of injustice or articulate conflicts about space.[4] For example, from around 2010, there has been a shift in attention within USA scholarship towards urban law, and towards questions pertaining to poverty, race and, more generally, the social justice implications of the legal regulation of the city.[5] In Australia and the Asia-Pacific, however, the attention has shifted to questions of ecological justice, with a focus on extractive industries, coastal environments and food patents;[6] while Israeli scholars have been preoccupied with the politics of the settler colonies and the Israel–Palestine conflict.[7] Space conflicts can arise between socio-economic groups, between ideologies, between humans and more-than-humans; it can be articulated as a conflict between exploitation and preservation, or in terms of privileged access to resources such as water, territory or minerals. For some, this focus on conflict and justice is part and parcel of the project of legal geography – its inescapable normative commitment. Interestingly, however, it seems that it is a specifically local (or continental) sensitivity that has led to the focus on these specific questions in different parts of the world. One wonders what questions and normative commitments a European project of legal geography would end up focusing on. Space, as such, allows for an analytical framework which brings together a range of elements that are often artificially separated as a consequence of more rigid disciplinary frameworks: social relations, legal constraints, material realities, more-than-human entities and economic effects.[8]
These three characteristics – thinking ‘spatially’; a reflexive awareness about the interaction between law, space and time; and the implicit normative commitment to make visible what law obscures – can be traced in most work on legal geography, regardless of their substantive focus.
- ↑ A Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘Law’s Spatial Turn: Geography, Justice and a Certain Fear of Space’ 7 (2010) Law, Culture and the Humanities 187.
- ↑ L Bennett and A Layard, ‘Legal Geography: Becoming Spatial Detectives’ 9 (2015) Geography Compass 408.
- ↑ Blomley (n 2); Delaney, ‘Legal Geography I’ (n 6) 96.
- ↑ Delaney, ‘Legal Geography II’ (n 6) 267.
- ↑ For example, K Attoh, ‘What Kind of Right is the Right to the City?’ 35 (2011) Progress in Human Geography 669.
- ↑ See the edited collection focusing on Australian and Asia-Pacific legal geography: O’Donnell et al (n 5).
- ↑ For example, A Kedar, ‘On the Legal Geography of Enthocratic Settler States: Notes towards a Research Agenda’ in Holder and Harrison (n 5).
- ↑ Many thanks to Loïc Azoulai for pointing this out.
