Legal Geography: Comparative Law and the Production of Space

Description

This book invites readers to critically rethink the interrelations between geography and the law. Traditionally, legal-geographical interrelations have been dominated by scholars with backgrounds in geopolitics, economics, or geography. More recently, a new interdisciplinary approach has been developed with the aim of offering a fresh perspective on how law and geography intersect. There has been a steady growth in cross-disciplinary research in this field; how legal-geographical taxonomies interrelate has attracted attention from scholars and academics with a diverse range of backgrounds – namely, law, anthropology, and human/physical geography –, thus giving rise to several publications. Against this backdrop, the book adopts a legal comparative perspective and assesses ‘normative spatialities’, which are the outcomes of processes of legal-spatial production. In addition, the comparative analysis offers readers new insights on some traditional geographic features which are essential to legal studies (territorial identity, regional demarcation, territorial alternation, and place-name policy). Examples are drawn from several jurisdictions (both from the Global North and the Global South) and partly employ a diachronic perspective. As its subversive character is ideally suited to revealing policies and agendas, comparative law is used to identify the ethnocentric and colonial biases underpinning the use (and misuse) of legal geographic devices by policymakers and academics. In sum, the book presents legal geography as an interdisciplinary undertaking in which geographers and legal scholars can jointly examine common concepts in the historical, cultural, political and social contexts in which law is practised. The book transcends the boundaries between disciplines to engage in a fruitful dialogue on how the law can help to address the current socio-geographic and ecological crises. Preface Contents About the Author Chapter 1: Law and Geography: A Special Relationship 1.1 Pluralising the Debate in Legal Geographical Studies 1.2 `Understanding the Spatial Dimensions´ in Law and Geography 1.3 Comparative Law and the Production of Space References Part I: Methodologies Chapter 2: From Law and Geography to Legal Geography 2.1 From Regulatory to Performative Practices 2.1.1 The Performative Practice of Comparative Law 2.1.2 `Integrated´ Geographies 2.2 Commonalities 2.3 Imbrications 2.3.1 Power, Comparative Law, and Geography 2.3.2 Desired Geographies and the Cartesian Mind 2.4 Interactions 2.4.1 Constitutional Interactions 2.4.2 Historical Interactions 2.4.3 Ideological Interactions 2.5 A `True Interdisciplinary Project´. The Emergence of Legal Geography 2.6 Creating Spatial Normativities 2.6.1 Thomas Kuhn´s Paradigm and Legal Geography 2.6.2 The Territorialised Paradigm of Legal Geography References Part II: Spatial Normativies Chapter 3: Law and `Geographies´ 3.1 Manufacturing Spatial Normativities 3.2 The Law of Spatiality 3.3 Processing Geographies 3.3.1 Representing the World Geographically 3.3.2 The `Logical Space´ of Geographies 3.3.3 Spatiality as a Politico-Legal Discourse 3.3.4 Uniform Design and Common Scale 3.4 Cartographic Digitalisation, Democratisation, and Imagination 3.4.1 Lived Geographies and Digitalised Democracies 3.4.2 Imagined Geographies by Proxy. Outer Space 3.5 Applying Legal Cartography 3.5.1 Legal Geomorphology and Natural Borders 3.5.2 Legal Hydrology 3.5.3 Antarctica References Chapter 4: Colonial Underpinnings: Spatiality of Law 4.1 Legal Geography, `Triumphant´ 4.2 Essentialising Space 4.2.1 On Place Names and Portolan Charts 4.2.2 Thinking Globally and Sanitising the World 4.2.3 Partitioning the Earth Along Global Lines 4.3 `The Earth Is the Lord´s´. British Integrated Geography of Land and Sea 4.3.1 The `Character´ of the Sea 4.3.2 Manufacturing Imperial Spatialities 4.4 Processing Spatial Superiority 4.5 The Law of Spatiality Beyond the Lines 4.5.1 Ethnocentrism: The Spatiality of Legal Systems 4.5.2 Spatialities Beyond the Lines: Americas 4.5.3 And Africa 4.6 Mapping and Ranking the Spatiality of Global Law 4.6.1 The Logical Space of Global Actors 4.6.2 The Legal Geography of Indicators References Chapter 5: Critical Legal Geographies 5.1 The Revival of Marginalised Legal Geographies 5.1.1 Buried, but Still Alive 5.1.2 Digging Out Native Legal Geographies 5.2 Law as Mode of Spatial Production 5.2.1 Between Domination and Critique 5.2.2 Ideo-logical Spaces as Spaces of Domination 5.2.3 Stirring Ideo-logical Law 5.3 Varieties of Ideo-logical Spaces 5.3.1 Global Ideo-logical Spaces 5.3.2 The Advent of Mortgaged Societies 5.3.3 Safe Ideo-logical Spaces 5.3.4 Ideo-logical Spaces of Doubt and Terror 5.3.5 Fencing States: Walled Ideo-logical Spaces 5.3.6 The Cité as an Ideo-logical Space 5.3.7 Informality and Resistance References Part III: Territorial Nomenclatures Chapter 6: Legal Geography, Linguistics, and Borders 6.1 Absolute and Relative Belongs of Public Law 6.2 Manufacturing Territorialised Legal Geographies 6.3 The Linguistics of Legal Geography 6.3.1 Places: Meaning, Lexicon, and Grammar 6.3.2 The Grammar of Legal Geography 6.4 Legal Geographical Primitives 6.4.1 The Linguistics of Places 6.4.2 Getting Hold of Places. Lines, Polygons, and Isoglosses 6.4.3 Overlapping Geographies of Law and Linguistics 6.5 From Primitives to Borders 6.6 Framing Territorial Identities 6.6.1 A Matter of Storytelling 6.6.2 Examples of Territorial Identities 6.7 The Power of Naming: The USA and the EU References Chapter 7: `Federal´ Legal Geographies 7.1 Federal Arrangements 7.1.1 From Containers to Territories 7.1.2 Scalar Legal Geographies 7.2 Scalar Primitives 7.2.1 Synthetic Jurisdictions 7.2.2 Functional Regions 7.2.3 Territorial Constitution 7.3 Regional Demarcation 7.3.1 Demarcating and Reshuffling 7.3.2 Demarcating Subnational Logical Spaces 7.3.3 Demarcation Criteria 7.3.4 Mixing Criteria Politically 7.3.5 Multi-National Territorial Constitutions 7.4 Territorial Alteration 7.4.1 Appropriating Spatial Reshufflings 7.4.2 Altering Logical Spaces: Procedures 7.4.3 Coherence Test 7.4.4 Functional Reshufflings References Part IV: De-territorialised Legal Geographies Chapter 8: Un-Bounded Legal Spaces 8.1 Beyond the Territorial Matrix 8.1.1 A Matrix with `Proprietary Traits´ 8.1.2 De-Territorialising Spaces? 8.2 Geophysical Continuities, Geopolitical Discontinuities 8.2.1 Geophysical Continuities: Atmosphere and Greenhouse Emissions 8.2.2 Geopolitical Discontinuities 8.3 Global Regimes 8.3.1 Places of Acquisitiveness 8.3.2 The Waste Regime 8.4 Geologic Qualities of Space 8.4.1 Beyond the Wasteocene 8.4.2 New Winning Arguments: Anthropocity 8.4.3 Pride and the Anthropocene 8.4.4 Anthropocene as an Ideo-logical Space 8.5 The Law of the Buyosphere 8.6 Digital Logical Spaces 8.6.1 From Territorial to Virtual 8.6.2 Alternate Reality Spaces 8.7 Spaces of Climate Change 8.7.1 The νθρωπ and the Spirit of the Cité 8.7.2 Spaces Beneath and Beyond the Anthropocene References Part V: Conclusions Chapter 9: Perspectives 9.1 Legal Geography Going Forwards? 9.2 Egalitarian Misery on a Planet `On Fire´ 9.3 Spaces of Possibilities 9.4 Coda References