Law, Geography of

The geography of law concerns the analysis of the ways in which legal practice produces and shapes space, and the spatial representations and metaphors found within law, with an examination of the political and ethical consequences of such legal geographies.

Space is everywhere; we live in and through a geographic world. Consider any mundane activity such as a visit to a shopping mall. This includes spatial practices (the act of shopping), spatial representation (the advertisements and designs within the mall that often are designed to conjure up images of other exotic places), place (or perhaps the absence thereof given the ways in which corporate domination and mall design conjoin to produce so-called placeless spaces), and scale (marketing and distribution networks through which “global” products are channeled to our local stores). A lawyer, on the other hand, would point out that law is everywhere; there is no aspect of our lives that is beyond law, defined either formally (in the sense of statutes, judicial interpretation, etc.) or informally (the messier, but no less important, legal sensibilities that we carry in our heads and express in our daily practices). Thus, in an immediate sense, law makes things happen. At an extreme, people may be confined or even killed in its name. Law also shapes social identities and relations; to say that one is a student, a citizen, or an owner is, in part, to speak legally. From this perspective, our visit to the mall could also be conceived in terms of the ways in which we bump into law, usually unconsciously but sometimes with surprising force. Our shopping trip is made possible by a network of legal arrangements such as property (e.g., ownership of the mall, leasehold arrangements, the transfer of property associated with our purchases) and contracts (e.g., the labor contracts into which workers enter).

Both the geographer and the lawyer would argue for the importance of space and law, respectively. The geographer, for example, might point out that the mall works, as an economic space, to the extent that its design and spatial layout induce people to spend money. The lawyer would argue that without thinking about law, we miss certain crucial qualities of the mall. For example, its legal designation as private property governs the sorts of political practices, such as pickets and protests, that can happen within it. Given the mall's contemporary importance to everyday life, the lawyer might argue, this has the effect of limiting political speech.

Separately, both of these accounts are persuasive. It is odd, then, that only recently have they been brought together. Social life, legal geographers argue, is both spatial and legal. The mall is both a space and a bundle of legal practices and discourses. So, for example, the mall's significance to speech is not an abstract one; it is the fact that people enter and use a physical space that gives it practical relevance. Thus, if law and space are important to social life separately, their combined effects may be worth examining. It is this realization that has prompted a number of scholars, in fields such as geography, anthropology, and law, to look more carefully at the geographies of law.

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