with reference to international law, legal geography ‘provides us with an opportunity to see that spaces within the terrain of international law are not static, linear and ordered, but rather complex, fluid and uncertain, evolving continuously along with the interactions of the different actors present, and emphasising varying sites of legal and non-legal regulation’.[1] The explicitly spatial perspective that legal geography brings can offer further depth and sophistication to the way this plays out in the EU, as well as challenge the rigid and somewhat tiresome assumption in EU legal studies that uniformity is – normatively, conceptually, descriptively – at the heart of European integration.[2]
Fourthly, EU law is a particularly ‘sticky’ kind of law. Whether it comes in the form of case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), commitments in treaties, or as secondary EU law, the norms articulated in EU law can – due to the principles of supremacy and direct effect, and the joint-decision trap – not easily be contested or reversed by political actors on the national or European level. EU law functions in a deeply, and deliberately, depoliticised space with a strong status quo bias. As Reecia Orzeck and Laam Hae have argued in a different context, ‘if the law’s contingency makes it harnessable, its inflexibility makes it worth harnessing’.[3] EU law, in other words, for better or worse, is an instrument through which life in Europe is mediated or negotiated. At the same time, it necessarily affects all corners of Europe – from the habitat of Finnish wolves to policing in the Strait of Gibraltar, and deals with questions ranging from bans on Airbnb in Venice to the geographical protection of Champagne. The depoliticised nature of law in the EU means that it is likely to be less responsive to law’s spatial context and consequences. Revealing how EU law is mediated in specific sites through non-traditional forms of mediation, adaptation and contestation is, therefore, crucial for questions relating to the authority of EU law.
Finally, as discussed, legal geography’s normative commitment is, itself, deeply revealing about the nature of a polity. In simple terms, different questions come into focus in different geographical contexts. The turn (in very general terms) towards questions of urban law in the USA, or indigenous and ecological questions in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, suggests specificity both in the sites of struggle as well as the normative commitments that legal geography engenders. What could this specificity mean in Europe? What makes Europe – in spatial, normative or geographical terms, specific? Which spatial conflicts emerge from the lens of the legal geographer, and are currently hidden and implicit in EU law and EU integration? What does the analytical framework offered by legal geography reveal about the texture of life under EU law?
Four sites that might be of particular interest to EU legal geographers are borders (especially within the context of the EU’s internal and external borders), the place for local tradition, the distribution of costs and benefits of climate change regulation and, given Europe’s dense population, gentrification and the interaction between human and more-than-human spaces. These sites seem particularly fraught in the EU (even if they obviously also appear in other parts of the world) and a clear understanding at the moment of EU law’s role in their creation or resolution is lacking. It would be inappropriate to predict which normative commitments might become implicit and explicit in a European project of legal geography. EU legal scholarship more generally, however, has seen an increased focus on (and sophistication of) concepts such as solidarity and vulnerability, which might be interesting for legal geographers as well.[4]
In short, the legal geography of the EU has the potential to reveal how EU law works: how it affects spaces and places, how it incorporates their demands, how it renders sites, people, animals and borders. It has the potential to offer crucial insights that will frame and deepen many of the questions with which doctrinal and constitutional scholars of EU law engage. More than that – it
- ↑ Z Pearson, ‘Spaces of International Law’ 17 (2008) Griffith Law Review 489.
- ↑ M Finck and F de Witte, ‘The Challenge of Challenges’ 21 (2020) German Law Journal 1.
- ↑ Orzeck and Hae (n 4) 843.
- ↑ E Fahey, ‘Future-Mapping the Directions of European Union Law: How Do We Predict the Future of EU Law’ 7 (2020) Journal of International and Comparative Law 265.
