Geography, Law And

Historical Background

In some ways, scholars have understood law and space as influencing each other ever since the emergence of geography as a distinct discipline in the eighteenth century. The earliest endeavors to combine geographical knowledge with legal reality took the shape of a systematic appraisal of law and legislation in geographical terms. Scholars analyzed spatial diversity of legal systems in terms of the underlying geography of the physical environment.

Charles-Louis de Montesquieu (1689–1755), for instance, rejected any transcendental solution that ignored the geographically specific conditions within any country: In his famous 1748 book,The Spirit of Laws, he wrote that laws are “human reason…. They should be in relation to the climate of each country, to the quality of its soil, to its situation and extent, to the principal occupation of the natives” (1949: 1.3). With the development of comparative law, in the early twentieth century, legal scholars developed a more systematic interest in geographic questions. The comparative lawyer John Henry Wigmore (1863–1943) authored a three-volume regional survey entitled A Panorama of the World's Legal Systems (1928), followed by The Kaleidoscope of Justice (1941), in which he explained the diversity of legal systems by referring to such variables as climate, natural resources, distance from the ocean, quality of the soil, and many other geographical factors. Russia and Brazil, he argued, because they are different geographic regions, will have many differences in law.

In the twentieth century, a new approach emerged seeking to understand the impact of law and legal institutions on the physical environment. While the previous approach sought to explain legal variations and transformations in terms of geographical factors, this new approach saw legal rules and institutions as affecting the physical environment. The thrust of the latter argument is that legal rules in diverse areas of the law, such as tax, local government, planning, and business regulation, influence the way space is organized, encouraging certain spatial patterns while discouraging others. If, for example, high taxes are imposed on agriculture while taxes on industry are kept low, agricultural areas [Page 642]will soon vanish to be replaced by industrial zones. Provision of subsidies for the construction of singlefamily housing will have a significant effect on the nature of the built-up areas.

Despite the obvious differences between the two approaches, they share a common basic precept. Although one can combine law and space in various ways, they are analytically divisible. Therefore, either “law” or “space” is treated as a fixed concept, an absolute “given” that acts on a more complex “variable.” Both approaches treat either law or the environment (and sometimes both) as completely outside, and unaffected by, social norms and practices. They ignore the fact that both law and space are complex concepts, which can produce ways of defining social reality, and they give rise to different ways of conceptualizing the world people live in.

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