Law, Geography of

Origins

The interface of law and geography has been of interest since at least the 19th century, when geographers, legal thinkers, and ethnologists sought to determine the influence that climate, environment, and social organization might have on the laws governing different “primitive” and “advanced” peoples. For the most part, however, law has developed independently of the social sciences, geography included. Modern legal thought, driven by positivist and normative perspectives, has long understood law as an autonomous and internally coherent sphere of human knowledge. In this sense, it is often held at an intellectual distance from the material world in which it is applied, leaving it “uncontaminated” by political, social, or cultural concerns. This is not a view that encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration, and while geographers do often engage with other disciplines, law has not traditionally been one of them.

In the 1960s and 1970s, however, scholars of law began to rethink the discipline's isolation from the social sphere. This body of work, typically dubbed “critical legal studies,” sought to challenge orthodox understandings of law, which invariably portrayed the latter as somehow “above” society and removed from politics and culture. Critical legal studies sought to show how, despite claims to the contrary, law naturalizes and normalizes particular kinds of social and political relationships and distributions of power. In the U.S. context, this notion is seen in terms of rights: The way in which the law and the courts address rights to abortion, sexual discrimination, privacy, or free speech are underscored by culturally and socially specific ideas about what makes for a “good” society. By analyzing legislative texts, jurisprudence, and legal scholarship, critical legal studies has both unsettled existing claims about rights and proposed more radically open-ended approaches to understanding rights under the law.

The break with classical understandings of law initiated by this movement was in turn extremely important for the community of legal scholars and geographers, who, from the late 1980s, started to bring the two disciplines into an interdisciplinary dialogue. If legal scholarship was concerned with rights and the law in a fairly abstract sense, legal geographers were more concerned with examining what Nicholas Blomley dubbed the “law-space nexus,” the ways in which geographical space figures in the legal field and the ways in which law, in turn, shapes space. Property law, for example, posits a set of powerladen spatial relationships between owners, who claim a kind of exclusive jurisdiction over a parcel of land, and nonowners, who enjoy a far more limited set of rights to the properties they may lease, rent, or otherwise use. Governing a society in which private property is seen in these terms requires not just the requisite legal texts but also a range of geographical strategies, from land surveys to cadastral maps, zoning laws, antitrespassing ordinances, and so on.

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