Abstract
In The Expanding Spaces of Law, the editors invite authors from Mexico, Germany, the United States, Canada and Israel to explore the interconnections between law and spatiality and their reciprocal construction. Scholars from disciplines as diverse as geography, sociology, anthropology and law use this interpretive framework to understand where and how law is ‘worlded’. Against this backdrop, the editors’ stated aim is to move legal geography beyond its discrete disciplinary boundaries of law and geography to identify new areas of inquiry.
The editors note that the transdisciplinary field of legal geography is a rich and diverse field that challenges the law as fixed, immutable and above society and politics. Inspired by advances in critical theory from across the social sciences and humanities, scholars consider law’s constantly emerging and evolving sites of influence and regulation. That said, the editors acknowledge that scholars could do more. They recognize the field’s predominantly Anglo-American and urban focus and how this has marginalized and excluded many areas of important study that would not only broaden the field but also enrich it. It is with these thoughts in mind that the editors propose a third mode of legal geography, namely post-disciplinary scholarship. In their view, the ten chapters in this book represent an important step in moving legal geography beyond its current ‘bidisciplinary interactions’ in law and geography to ‘elucidating third discipline interests’ (p. 9).
This edited collection is full of rich possibilities for consideration in legal geography. Beginning with Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann’s chapter, the reader is given insights into the anthropology of law and legal pluralism in Nepal and the former German Democratic Republic. Using these nations as case studies, the authors argue that legal spaces are unfixed and as they ‘fade in and out’ new legal systems and political processes such as globalization become more pronounced and accelerated over time (p. 46). Mariana Valverde’s chapter is a critique of legal geographers’ tendency to treat space and time as discrete rather than intertwined. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘chronotopes’, she argues that this concept will allow us to explore ‘how different legal times create and shape spaces, and how the spatial location and spatial dynamics of legal processes in turn shape law’s times’ (p. 69). Following on from this, Nicholas Blomley deploys pragmatism and John Dewey’s work on ‘habitat’ to examine practices of law and the relationships of those practices to legal spaces. Expanding this discussion, Alexander Kedar argues that legal geography ignores its colonial history and power relationships in colonial settings. He offers an alternative account of the history of dispossession and the ‘violent spatialisations’ that have been the legacy of legal transplants in the post-colonial world (p. 102). Irus Braverman’s chapter directs our attention inwards to how we do our research, arguing that ethnographic methods are useful tools for engaging with power and challenging linear understandings of space in institutional contexts. In a unique approach to institutional power relationships, Braverman examines North American zoos as useful sites to interrogate how ‘power and responsibility are exercised’ (p. 125). Michael Smith explores the effects of martial law within the context of contemporary Western interventionism in the Middle East. Specifically, he argues that we should focus on the ‘on-going rescaling of the state and the transformation of sovereignty’ and the ‘political and economic processes of globalisation’ as examples of how notions of what is ‘inside/outside the nation-state is constantly shifting’ (p. 145).
Elsewhere, Antonio Azuela and Rodrigo Meneses-Reyes examine how urban spaces are given social meaning through legal practices around land reformation in Mexico, arguing that these processes are best understood ‘as practices of state formation’ argued around who is the most competent to interpret legal space (p. 181). In contrast, Lisa Pruitt examines what she claims is a neglected topic in critical legal scholarship, namely rural space. Pruitt argues that in rural United States, the law is ‘distant from people’s lives, they struggle to make it relevant’ (p. 191). She submits that some spaces remain lawless. And yet, legal process that imposed its will on people and territory ‘shaped the lived character of the rural’ (207). Pruitt concludes that legal discourse and practice exacerbate and reinforce rural marginalization.
In the penultimate chapter, Melissa Harm Benson examines the rules and practices around dispute resolution in the United States. She asserts that these rules produce and sustain their own legal geographies. Focusing on challenges to government actions related to natural resources and environmental management, Harm Benson examines the rules governing challenges to state conduct. Finally, David Delaney’s chapter concludes the collection by asking: What questions would forge new paths for critical legal geography? In an interesting departure, Delaney uses the concept of social suffering to examine the workplace and the ‘social production of fear, humiliation and anxiety’ as lived experiences (p. 241). Here Delaney is focusing on the spatial process of governing through emotions.
In my view, the greatest strength of this edited collection is its ambitious and unwavering commitment to advancing legal geography and interrogating legal spatiality. Throughout the book contributors provide concrete examples of legal spatiality and draw upon a range of interdisciplinary literatures and schools to make their case. I found, in particular, Azuela and Meneses-Reyes’ interrogation and engagement with legal spatiality in Urban Mexico to be very interesting. In this chapter, the authors demonstrate what fruitful contributions are waiting to be heard beyond the intellectual exclusion zone that is Anglo-American legal geography. That said, I have questions and concerns about the state of legal geography that seem to be present in this collection. Whilst I agree with the editors that the field must always endeavour to develop and challenge its epistemological and ontological limitations, on balance I have reservations about whether the editors have moved or indeed are ready to move the debate forward at this time. My concerns fall into four broad categories: law as a sovereign power, dominance of abstraction, the continued Anglo-American dominance of the field and hollowed out subjectivity.
First, when I began to read this book I posed the following question to myself: What would a post-disciplinary legal geography look like? As a legal geographer, I find that I would welcome that eventuality in the fullness of time. I agree with the editors’ assertion that it is time to leave the field’s bidisciplinary engagement behind. Fruitful interdisciplinary research has come when we move to an understanding of law as intertwined with and participating in other socio-spatial, cultural and political relationships (Gregory, 2006; Hubbard et al., 2008; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2011; Scoular, 2015). Whilst on the one hand, human geography has long recognized the dynamic and relational qualities of spatiality, on the other hand, these ideas provide critical legal scholarship with important and often unconsidered conceptual tools to uncover the ‘fluid, nonlinear and experiential practices produced through law’ (p. 17). Moreover, this conceptual framework challenges the notion of law as a sovereign and unidirectional expression of power that is above politics and outside society. This understanding seems to be key to this collection. Therein lies the rub. I believe that the above-cited quotation reveals the problem that continues to dog the field and is manifest in this collection. In short, I find that the collection as a whole is unable to avoid viewing law as a discrete, unified and monolithic system that acts on space (see e.g. the chapters by Smith and Harm Benson). Whilst authors point out that law and space are intertwined processes, I am left with the sense that they struggle to decentre law from its dominant ideological perch.
And this brings me to my second concern about this edited collection. Whilst the collection provides multiple chapters that give examples of how law is worlded (see e.g. the chapter by Blomley), I think that like legal geography discussed elsewhere, much of the discussion in this book (despite claims to the contrary about the need to establish the ‘on-the-ground’ reality of ‘lived’ experience of legal spatiality) remains at the level of abstraction. There are important exceptions: for example, I found the chapters by Antonio Azuela and Rodrigo Meneses-Reyes and Lisa Pruitt very interesting. These authors moved the discussion away from the abstract and demonstrated how the legal spatiality as a set of discursive and material practices operates within wider systems of meaning. At a more substantive level, I find that the collection as a whole fails to grasp how people understand, experience and negotiate the messy realities of life through the spatiality of law and law’s spatiality.
The editors acknowledge that legal geography is a diverse sub-discipline, encompassing a wide range of topics. I agree it is. And yet, I had difficulty as a legal geographer to see my research and teaching interests in this book. Given that the editors acknowledge that Anglo-American scholars dominate the field, I think they could have given more thought to their authors and their contributions. With the exception of Azuela, Menses-Reyes and Kedar, all the contributors hail from the Anglo-American academic world. As it stands, the collection represents a very narrow and exclusionary view of what I understand critical legal geography’s potential.
This leads me directly to my next concern. The interpretation on legal spatiality that dominates this collection comprises a very homogenous worldview. This comes into sharp focus in the editors’ exclusion of complex readings of human subjectivity and how it interacts with legal spatiality. And this brings me back to my concern about legal geography’s continued attachment to abstraction. This abstraction fails to engage with the complex ways in which individuals experience legal spatiality and legal process from their ‘place’ in the world. To disrupt this metanarrative, the authors would have to deal with their subject material in ways that pay attention to categories like gender, ‘race’, class and sexuality, to name but a few. This collection produces a very masculinist reading of legal geography, and one that seems to ignore decades of poststructuralist and feminist contributions to human geography and law that enrich our understanding of how individuals negotiate the ‘placement’ within legal spaces (Dixon, 2011; Hyndman and Moutz, 2006; Katz, 2001). To cite some examples, in his chapter Nicholas Blomley focuses on how individuals take up and interact with the law. Elsewhere, David Delaney contemplates how specific social spatialization produced and distribute suffering in the work place. Both of these topics are useful and interesting in themselves. And yet, in these chapters, human subjectivity and its interactions with legal spatiality is hollowed out and experienced by a curiously homogenous individual. There is no acknowledgement of how the individual’s location in social space influences how he/she experiences power, suffering or exclusion.
Taken together, these issues suggest to me that we are neither ready nor should we attempt to move to a post-disciplinary phase in critical legal geography. There are simply too many gaps in our understanding of legal spatiality. We need more serious consideration of the complexity and diversity of human interactions with how law and space are mutually constituted and experienced by people. It seems to me that there are links and contradictions between legal spatiality and power that this collection raises that require further examination. Here I thought that the editors’ commitment to moving to a post-disciplinary phase might have inhibited other important and interesting lines of inquiry.