Legal geography III: Legal agency

Introduction

What happens to law when the imagining and performing subject is not an official, not a unity, not autonomous, and does not identify with the system? […] What happens to law when its constituting subject and groupings of subjects are diverse, differently situated, differently embodied, and entirely plural? What “fantastic imaginings” of law might exist and be possible? (Davies, 2017: 109)

This progress report has two overarching aims: first, to discuss the “fantastic imaginings” of law that Margaret Davies (2017: 109) connects to the diverse conceptions of legal agency; and second, to debate how this diversification can be seen as steps towards more responsible understanding of legal agency.

While writing my previous progress reports on everyday law (Kymäläinen, 2024), and on the concept of place in legal geographical thinking (Kymäläinen, 2025), I recognized how the question of agency was implicitly present in legal geographical debates, albeit seldom explicitly discussed. Legal agency and how it unfolds could be read between the lines or by relating the texts and their approaches to each other. While questions of agency are crucial in the current global threats to democracy, difference and environment, I concentrate in this progress report on asking how legal geographers have understood legal agency, what these views can add to the debates on agency dominated by legal scholars, and what we can learn about responsibility by exploring agency (cf. Kuus, 2019).

Legal geographical debates on agency are interdisciplinary, linked with legal, spatial, social and political theories, as well as fields of study such as anthropology, environmental science, social policy, socio-legal studies, or urban research. As with all progress reports, it is impossible to cover here all relevant literature or viewpoints, and therefore, this report should be approached only as a limited interpretation of legal agency and the ways of thinking of it for legal geography. Moreover, the report aims to avoid major overlaps with David Delaney’s (2015, 2016, 2017) and Alex Jeffrey’s (2019, 2020, 2021) progress reports on legal geography.

The structure of the report follows wider changes in the understanding of legal agency which, I argue, can be seen as steps towards more responsible and ethical understanding of agency. The first part of the report examines how legal agency has traditionally been associated with those who Delaney (2010) calls “nomospheric technicians”: legal experts whose power and influence come from their distinct, privileged position in relation to the law. The second section is about the expansion of the conception of legal agency to concern lived legalities and everyday contexts of legal agency. This step is important as it acknowledges the pervasiveness of law in mundane life, as well as the actions of those who feel powerless in formal legal contexts. The third part of the report concerns the broadening of the anthropocentric understanding of agency by other-than-human approaches. These have thrown into relief how legal agency and legal spaces are not solely matters of human beings, but are formed in the relations of humans and nonhumans.

The power of legal experts

Most interpretations of legal agency have been human-centered, emphasizing legal expertise. As Davies (2017: 108) notes, in classical legal philosophy, legal subjects were imagined as mirror images of law: they were thought to be sovereign and self-determining, and being “invested with a special power to know, understand and interpret the law.” Delaney (2010), on their part, writes about nomospheric technicians who are authorized and empowered, and have a privileged and distinct position in relation to law. They operate within the networks of state power, while at the same time being constrained by their formal position (Delaney, 2010, 2015). Or, they can be regarded, following Olivia Barr (2016), as legal writers who share and create legal knowledge through an office they hold, or institutions in which they operate. Legal writers like these have both the capacity and the responsibility to “shape understandings of law” (p. 35).

The work of legal agents can be considered as a significant form of world making or “worlding” (Bennett and Layard, 2015; Delaney, 2010; Jeffrey et al., 2024). This means that legal actions create legal relationships and particular ways of understanding them. Delaney (2010) describes the work of legal agents as a “fabrication process, where raw materials are brought together and worked on” (p. 159). By raw materials Delaney refers to disturbing situations, the legal sense of these situations, socio-spatial imaginaries, and rhetorics that guide legal arguments toward certain conclusions. The process of fabrication aims at persuasion – to make the audience think about the world in a certain way. Although the legal actors of the fabrication process would not consider themselves being political, legal actions often aim at desired results (Delaney, 2010).

How legal expertise unfolds and turns into action, is also a matter of others than the experts. I present here three approaches to these agentical linkages: assemblages of legal expertise, empowerment of law, and territories as agents. Firstly, Luisa Sotomayor, Sergio Montero and Natalia Ángel-Cabo (2023: 452) write about “new assemblages of legal expertise” in Colombia. These assemblages are formed in the interaction and alliances between legal experts and a plethora of other actors, such as politicians, neighborhood groups, social movements, or individual citizens who try to influence urban planning and policy by using – or threatening to use – legal expertise and practices. Sotomayor et al. (2023) regard the involvement of judiciary in urban planning as undermining the political agendas of mayors and the work of urban planners (cf. Rannila, 2021 about legal mobilization that aims to secure legal and democratic decision-making). The Colombian case exemplifies, as the authors argue, the need to conceptualize legal action in a broader framework where the work of the experts is not detached from the agency of other groups, instances or individuals.

Secondly, in some cases legal experts’ agency and its formal results empower private actors by determining legal positions (Delaney, 2015) and increasing some people’s self-understanding and motivation so that they are more willing to regard themselves as competent legal subjects (Sarat and Kearns, 1995). This is well illustrated by different positions as regards property: how law constitutes the status and socio-legal powers of a property owner, and at the same time situates others (such as tenants or squatters) in relation to that. All these positions include vulnerabilities, capacities, rights and responsibilities that allow or require one to act in a certain way: to exclude others, to pay a rent or a land tax, or call for the coercive force of the state in case of problems (e.g., Blomley, 2023; Byer, 2023; Delaney, 2010). In addition to opening possibilities for agency, to some extent law also expects people to act according to the social and legal power that law has granted for them – for instance to keep their rented properties in a decent and safe condition.

Thirdly, legal expertise also builds a conception of territories as legal agents. Inspired by Robert Sack’s (1986) work on territories, Nicholas Blomley (2016a, 2023) writes that while power relations become territorialized, these relations are at the same time depersonalized, neutralized, and made to seem non-political. This territorialization of power relations can be problematic as it tends to make territory itself appear as a legal agent in its own right. Territory appears to act upon the socio-spatial world, causing restrictions (e.g., allowing only limited access to persons convicted of a certain crime), creating conflicts over property, or creating outlaws of persons who are precarious in relation to property (e.g., squatters, activists, strikers, protester, or houseless people) (Blomley, 2023; Sylvestre et al., 2019). In a similar vein, Beverley Clough and Henrietta Zeffert (2026) write how the spatialization of law constructs home agency, and presents home as an agent that sustains legal power or establishes and maintains borders between us and them.

As regards legal expertise, it is also worthwhile pointing to a recent article by Alex Jeffrey et al. (2024). The authors explore how geographers have themselves contributed to the making of law and have, thus, acted as powerful legal agents. The conception of legal work was broad in the article: not all studied geographers had been directly involved in legal processes, but they could themselves define how their work had shaped the law – whether through legal action, policymaking, or serving as an expert witness. The interviewed geographers had crossed boundaries between geographical and legal knowledges and brought geographical ideas into legal processes, thus reshaping legal practices and also modifying their own practices. This transgressive legal work had involved feelings of being “out of place” (cf. Cresswell, 1996), yet it also led to new solidarities and to re-focusing the interviewees’ legal geographical research.

Everyday legal agency

Concentration on formal state actors and other legal experts is not enough in the exploration of legal agency, and underplays the importance of non-state actors, mundane relations and socio-political processes in the constitution of agency. Law becomes materialized, performed, lived, enacted, enforced and resisted in mundane spaces, places and landscapes, and can, at the same time, motivate people to act. As Shaina Potts (2024) notes, law not only affects the lives of people who are involved in litigation, but also those who could potentially be involved (cf. Sotomayor et al., 2023). Therefore, there is not “legal closure” – the static existence of law outside of social relations and spatial contexts – but rather “agential complexity” (Potts, 2024: 21), which requires contextualizing the situation, “denaturalizing common assumptions about law today and […] refusing bounded understandings of legal acts, instead identifying links between and among people, places, and discourses at multiple spatio-temporal scales” (p. 23).

Sensitivity towards agential complexity has been shown in studies acknowledging legal pluralism and the existence of overlapping – formal and informal – laws that come together in specific places and in the contexts of everyday lives (more about these in previous progress reports: Kymäläinen, 2024, 2025). The broad conception of agency, as formulated by Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey (1998: 20), argues that the everyday operations of law “makes us all legal agents insofar as we actively make law, even when no formal legal agent is involved”. Legal geographical scholarship has widely agreed with these views, noting the importance of recognizing the agency of all actors in the enactment, understanding and imagining law (e.g., Brickell et al., 2021; Delaney, 2010; Kedar et al., 2018), as well as in transmitting and affecting, or making and maintaining law (e.g., Blomley, 2014; Davies, 2017; von Benda-Beckmann et al., 2009).

The broadening of the conception of legal agency towards the everyday and the informal opens up ways to analyze law in ways that matter outside of institutions, office and expertise. Agency can thus be seen as “a capacity to act in a given context” (Kuus, 2019: 163), being “rooted in specific social contexts and needs” (p. 165). Sensitivity to the contexts and needs requires acknowledging structural constraints and inequalities (e.g., Mitchell, 2020; Przybylinski, 2025), but also recognizing those actions that may seem insignificant in the big picture, yet matter in the lives of the agents themselves. This increases sensitivity to understand how some people or groups are uncomfortable by being portrayed as vulnerable and having no agency although they create opportunities for legal activity with the means that they have and in ways that are significant for them (Pinto, 2021).

Everyday legal agency, thus, concerns all people, including those who never end up solving problems with legal experts, even if they face serious threats that could be solved in legal processes. Some legal scholars have argued that when exploring this dilemma, it is not enough to pay attention to equal access to justice so that everyone would have “similar chances of obtaining similar resolutions to similar kinds of […] problems” (Sandefur, 2009: 954); there is also a need to focus on legal agency that acknowledges the interactions and relationships that take place outside the formal legal system (Brinks, 2019; Pinto, 2021). As Brinks (2019: 351) argues, “law operates mostly through texturing people’s daily experiences, often quite removed from any legal institution, although always in the shadow of those institutions.” Recognizing this informal side is also important because people commonly avoid legal processes because of financial costs, but even more so because they lack trust in formal legal system, are embarrassed about their problems, feel powerless in legal processes, or fear consequences of taking action (Sandefur, 2009). Problems may, thus, not be solved at all, or they may be solved within alternative legal orders or customary legal systems, such as indigenous or religious groups or self-managing communities (Brinks, 2019; von Benda-Beckmann et al., 2009). Although many of these orders and systems support the legal agency of the group, they may also include severe problems related to human rights, such as subordination of women and silencing their voices (e.g., Blomley, 2023; Brinks, 2019; Schenk, 2020), exclusion of outsiders and those who do not conform to the community’s rules, or limiting the freedom of religion or speech (Brinks, 2019).

Other-than-human agency

The emphasis on everyday legal agency can, potentially, make us realize that legal agency is a matter of all human beings – not just of those who are competent or powerful in formal legal processes. Other-than-human viewpoints, for their part, orient scholars to address the restrictive nature of anthropocentrism, and to increase awareness of how legal orders and spaces are also affected by nonhumans.

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2019a, 2019b) has argued that in order to advance responsible legal thinking and to fight current instabilities, legal geographers need to think law imaginatively (cf. Davies, 2017), and to push the boundaries of legal action and thought. This is needed in order to explore nonhuman and human capacities for legal action, and to see the effects of the “human, nonhuman or inhuman, material or immaterial, things or ideas” on law (2019b: 477).

Legal geography’s imaginative thinking has recently been most vibrantly carried out by scholars concerned by other-than-human or posthuman agencies, posthumanist interpretations of law, and materialist and relational ontologies (e.g., Bennett, 2016; Braverman, 2023; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015, 2019a, 2019b). Reasons for the popularity of these approaches are, undoubtedly, related to the world-wide threats and changes that have forced scholars to think beyond anthropocentric focus. Other-than-human emphasis, still, does not obscure human responsibility, but on the contrary, puts more pressure to interpreting legal agency as relational and multiple, being constrained and enabled by nonhumans (Kuus, 2019).

Irus Braverman (2018) has stated that since legal geography engages space, matter, and corporeality, it has much potential for dealing with more-than-human legalities, and for moving “toward a dynamic and fluid approach that makes visible […] the myriad relational ways of being in the world, their significance to law, and in turn, law’s signficance to these other modes of existence” (p. 141). Braverman’s (e.g., 2016, 2023) work has widely advanced more-than-human legal geography, recently by developing “amphibious legal geographies” that seeks “to recognize the shared material and symbolic qualities of both land and sea and our continued existence as an ‘edge species’ that thrives not only by the sea but also with the sea” (Braverman, 2023: 2).

Some studies have shown how legal orders are affected by nonhumans in very concrete ways, resulting from moving animals such as wolves, reindeers, sheep, or wild animals (e.g., Brown et al., 2019; Ojalammi and Blomley, 2015; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015), tree growth (Blomley, 2016b), plants that prevent human interventions (Davies, 2015), natural conditions (Bartel and Graham, 2023), disruptive and ungovernable insects such as bees and bedbugs (Mawani, 2019), inanimate objects that affect our legal lives (Bennett, 2016; Traynor and Tomczak, 2021), or places that actively shape legal practices (Bartel, 2018; Bartel and Graham, 2023). One possible approach is presented by Gustav Stenseke Arup (2025) who starts with the landscape, and explores with a morphogenetic approach how law emerges in human/nonhuman relationships of a specific area. Stenseke Arup demonstrates this with the case of the protection of wolves. Instead of analyzing the situation from a perspective of formal laws, Stenseke Arup’s focus is on how law emerges in landscapes and is entangled with various socio-ecological and socio-political processes as the wolves move around the area. A morphogenetic approach, thus, blurs “the conceptual borders between the legal and everything else in the landscape” and regards law “as an emergent phenomenon constituted by relations of processes that in themselves are not viewed as legal” (p. 126).

Nonhuman thinking includes challenging questions, such as follows: What or where is the agency of construction materials like bricks, concrete and rock that cannot speak, but are still sustaining our social systems (Bennett, 2016)? Or how to “consult the beings that populate the more-than-human-world” (Boulot and Sterlin, 2022)? Luke Bennett (2016, 2025) argues that questions like these are wrongly formulated: they are too anthropocentric, but they also reveal our own positionality and the inevitable gap of knowability between human and other entities. Margaret Davies (2015), similarly, notes that nonhumans should not be assumed to be like humans, but our effort could, rather, be to support nature’s intrinsic values and the interconnection of human and nonhuman worlds. Davies notes that even though nonhuman entities are occasionally granted legal status (cf. Charpleix, 2017 on the legal personhood of a river), this is usually done for symbolic or instrumental reasons. These actions, still, open visions for understanding the legal dynamics between humans and nonhumans.

Instead of answering impossible questions, we can be more attentive to the ways in which human practices and desires are linked with nonhumans (Bennett, 2016, 2025). Research concerning Indigenous law and knowledges, and their relation to nature and other species are well-known examples of this kind of work (e.g., Pasternak, 2017; Hunt/Tlalilila’ogwa, 2025; Loivaranta, 2026). Within formal legal systems, attentiveness to co-agency has been explored, for instance, as regards wildlife conservation and management that considers animals as active participants whose complex, adaptive, and context-sensitive behavior shapes human/wildlife relations and spaces, and influences the results of conservation and management (Edelblutte et al., 2023). Significant here is not only the actual formation of practices, but also how animal agency and its recognition is narrated and brought into awareness. As Emille Boulot and Joshua Sterlin (2022: 30) argue, it matters how the narratives in law are formed: whether nature is only referred to as a commodity, or if other viewpoints or agencies are equally made visible.

Conclusions

In this progress report, I have discussed legal agency from three legal geographical viewpoints. Each of them has led into significant theoretical and empirical work related to legal capabilities, possibilities and restrictions. All three approaches are equally significant since they reveal and obscure different aspects of agency (cf. Kuus, 2019), and show that legal geography is well positioned to discuss legal agency beyond traditional legal thinking. Legal agency has traditionally been associated with formal legal systems and powerful legal experts. In legal geographical thinking, this conception has been broadened, firstly, towards everyday legal agency that takes place in specific spaces, places and contexts, and secondly, towards acknowledging how human legal agency is affected and co-constituted with nonhumans.

Both of these expansions of the understanding of legal agency can be consired ethical steps. They have made visible agency that matters for people in less powerful positions, as well as agency beyond an anthropocentic focus. At the same time, the expanded thinking has increased the relevance of legal geographical scholarship in those geographical areas where the informal legal agency of the less powerful is part of everyday life, or where the human-made legal spaces and orders are continually affected by nonhuman species or natural hazards.

Although legal geography has opened new avenues for imagining law and legal agency, there is still much to be done. For instance, there is surprisingly little research on the multiple sides of agency: agency is mostly seen in positive ways, although it can also include contradictory and questionable actions and motivations (e.g., Williams, 2021) – for instance, related to misogyny or racism. Now that democratic actions are globally threatened and scientific facts questioned, it is all the more important to develop legal geographical interpretations of this kind of agency, and how it relates to the spatialities of our lives.