European Law Open (2022), 1, 126–130
doi:10.1017/elo.2022.3
DIALOGUE AND DEBATE: SYMPOSIUM ON LEGAL GEOGRAPHY AND EU LAW
On legal geography as an analytical toolbox for EU legal studies
Maria Persdotter1* and Andrea Iossa2
1Post doc researcher in Welfare Law, Linköping University, Sweden and 2Senior lecturer in Labour law, Kristianstad University, Sweden
*Corresponding author. E-mail: maria.persdotter@liu.se
(Received 13 November 2021; revised 23 December 2021; accepted 7 January 2022)
- Abstract
- EU legal geography concerns itself with the mutually constitutive relationship between EU law and space (also, and increasingly so, time). This requires reconstructing and systematizing the widely used concepts which reveal the geographical basis of EU law (such as movement and circulation), but also developing a particular viewpoint, indeed a specific “ethos of investigation”, which equips us with the tools to challenge and transcend the dominant ways of doing EU law. In particular, it is argued that a geographic turn in European legal studies will foster the study of how law works “on the ground” and will allow challenging taken-for-granted ideas about the relationship between law and political order, while throwing new light on the very technical concepts with which we reconstruct, analyse and assess EU law
Keywords: legal methods; free movement; sociology of law
1. Introduction
This is a joint reply to Floris de Witte article, included in the present issue of European Law Open. We were very pleased to read de Witte contribution. It was about time that someone ventured into the uncharted lands of imaginary dragons and proposed a research agenda for legal geography in European Union (EU) legal studies! De Witte article is remarkably clear, comprehensive, and free from the type of conceptual excesses that mark many current debates on space and time.[1] De Witte describes in straightforward terms what it means to ‘think spatially’ and why it is useful to do so in order to understand the workings of EU law ‘on the ground’. In particular, de Witte identifies several concrete areas and developments in the EU legal order that both reveal the intertwined relationship between EU law and its spatial ‘context’, and that call for a legal geographic analysis, such as the changing status and role of city authorities in EU law.
As de Witte so expertly explains, legal geography is a truly interdisciplinary approach, concerned with the mutually constitutive relationship between law, space and, increasingly also, time.[2] These relationships are intensely concrete. The geography of both ‘natural’ and social life is thoroughly structured by law. Conversely, law is embedded in social and political processes, and
- ↑ To be clear, some abstract theorising is necessary and unavoidable. However, a disproportionate focus on conceptual questions (eg ‘which concept is more appropriate to describe a phenomenon, x or y?’) risks precluding other types of empirical and theoretical inquiries. See discussion in Mariana Valverde, Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance (Routledge 2015) 2. Existing literature in legal geography seems to us to be tilted towards conceptually and theoretically oriented work at the expense of more empirically oriented studies.
- ↑ Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Alexandre Kedar (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.
