Moving forward with Legal Geographies at RGS 2014
February 21, 2014 1 Comment
We have been delighted with the response to our recent Legal Geography call for papers for RGS 2014, with submissions coming from the UK, France, Italy, Australia, Brazil, the United States (3), covering empirical work in Nauru, Estonia, Cambodia as well as the US, UK and Europe. We have submissions from disciplines including law, geography and politics. As a result we’ve got 15 great papers for our session, and this is a very positive response rate, which bodes very well for this (re)emergent hybrid field.
Antonia Layard (University of Bristol) and I have had to secure special permission from the RGS to run a three-part session to fit all of these papers in. We’re delighted to have heard back this morning that this permission has been granted. The breadth of coverage and strength of the proposed papers have helped us to secure this dispensation. The RGS’ conference is focused upon ‘co-production’ this year, and so our array of topics, scales of analysis and the global reach of the papers has helped to press the right buttons. We’ve decided on the session title ‘Moving forward with Legal Geographies’ – the plural here reflecting the wonderful variety of legal geographic endeavour and concern that the papers attest to, and the ‘moving forward’ bit pointing to the way that the papers show the boundaries of legal geography being stretched both methodologically and theoretically.
We don’t yet know which day (27, 28 or 29th August) our session will run. That will be notified to us around April. There are more details about the conference here:
Antonia and I are collaborating to promote Legal Geography and to develop a UK community with active links to the established LG communities in Australia and Northern America, but also to help spread the focus out from its Anglo-Saxon predominance. To that end anyone who’s interested can join our open conversations at our (very basic but workable) wiki site:
http://lawandgeography.wikidot.com/.
We are also currently guest editing a Legal Geography special edition of the International Journal of Law in the Built Environment, to be published towards the end of the year (papers currently in review), and are working upon our own LG outputs (jointly and individually).
As a taster of our session’s content, here’s the overarching session description from our proposal document:
This legal geography stream proceeds from the assumption (which appears to be widely accepted, though critiques are always welcome) that space, society and law are co-constituted, that there is a nexus, which ebbs and flows, co-producing the legal, spatial and social everyday. Legal geography has, in other words, been ‘born’. Given this assumption, this stream aims to consider how the cross-discipline is being applied and extended, presenting papers that identify new and ongoing lines of spatio-legal inquiry, research and theory.
The first session, Legal productions of spaces and environments, focuses on the co-production of legal, economic and political practices and principles across space. By examining diverse examples ranging across the judicial imagination’s regard for Brazilian environments, the Severnscape and the relational networks formed through contract law in West Midlands engineering supply chains, it asks how legal discourse and practices contribute to the making and control of identities, relationships and sites of encounter at multiple scales. Reaching back through an American reading of E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters and considering Italian constructions of ‘security’, the session also investigates how scale is used as a framing device to govern across social and spatial distances.
The second session, Interrogating assumptions of legal closure, investigates the critique of legal practice, that it is enclosed, which lies at the heart of legal geography. The session begins with two papers, drawing on material from UK/European legal decisions and empirical legal work in New Mexico, which demonstrate the effect that legal closure still has in governing space. However, papers investigating legal pluralism, in domestic violence in Cambodia, ‘Indian country’ in the United States and constructions of families in Ghana and the United States, illustrate the slippage, and discretion, in formal legal rules when studied as ‘laws in action’.
The third session, Legal materialities, asks how spaces and places are themselves co-produced – legally and politically as well as socially and spatially. It emphasises the importance of materiality, asking how the spatio-legal is implicated in managing places (including the International Court in the Hague, the island of Nauru, a Derbyshire cotton mill and an Estonian car park) as well as troublesome resources such as phosphate, dye and nuclear wastes. The session considers, in particular, how the spatio-legal frames and marshalls the arrangements of things in space and constellates the environments of which they form part. It also considers how law is translated into flows of matter, giving rise to resultant assemblages of materials, provisions and practices and their resultant landscapes.
As the conference approaches I will post more details here, identifying the speakers and more about their papers.
In closing, here’s a glance across to ‘where next’ visions offered up by two recent synoptic reviews of the Legal Geography field, one from Australia and one from North America/Israel:
“Legal geography would benefit from deepening its connections with posthuman and critical animal studies scholarship and from studies of the vibrancy of matter (Jane Bennett 2010), and its science and entanglements (Karen Barad 2007) in particular. Such explorations will ground legal geography in corporal matters, moving us away from abstract notions of space into “more-than-human” (Sarah Whatmore 2006) legal geographies…. Although legal geographers are already actively engaged with postcolonial theory, science studies, poststructuralism, thing theory, performativity and many other fields, we should be engaging with still more fields, such as the humanities and posthumanities, physical geography, economics, psychology and psychoanalysis, material culture, architecture, organizational studies, and visual culture.”
(Braverman et al 2013: 20-21)
And:
“…By situating law in space, that is, within its physical conditions and limits, legal geography encourages place based knowledge to form law’s basis. We are advocating for a paradigmatic shift, from the alienation of people and place in law and geography to their necessary connection. In this way legal geography provides both intellectual insight and real-world application: it can produce work of practical policy relevance as well as speak truth to power.”
(Bartel et al, 2013: 349)
The array of presentations at RGS 2014 respond very positively to those pointers to new areas of a relational and materiality focussed legal geographic enquiry, they also embrace other territories of investigation called for by Braverman et al (2013) variously addressing rural legalities, spatio-temporal effects, pragmatism, legal pluralism, the relationality of power and purpose, variation of scale and comparison across jurisdictions alongside that interrogation of the materiality of law’s objects, law’s spaces and law’s habits.
References
Bartel R, Graham N, Jackson S, Prior J.H, Robinson D.F, Sherval M and Williams S (2013) ‘Legal Geography: An Australian Perspective’, Geographical Research, 51(4), 339-353.
Braverman I, Blomley J, Delaney D and Kedar A (2013) The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Paper No. 2013-032, SUNY Buffalo Law School, New York.
Image source: Vellum parchment at UK parliamentary archives via http://londonhistorians.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/the-parliamentary-archives-with-london-historians/ photo by Peter Twist.
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