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Legal Geography: Becoming Spatial Detectives
Author(s) -
Bennett Luke,
Layard Antonia
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
geography compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.587
H-Index - 65
ISSN - 1749-8198
DOI - 10.1111/gec3.12209
Subject(s) - human geography , context (archaeology) , sociology , field (mathematics) , variety (cybernetics) , space (punctuation) , critical geography , time geography , scholarship , cultural geography , historical geography , law , geography , social science , political science , development geography , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics , archaeology , artificial intelligence , computer science , pure mathematics
Legal geography investigates the co‐constitutive relationship of people, place and law. This essay provides an overview of how the law and geography cross‐disciplinary project emerged from a context of mutual curiosity and explores how legal practice, in all its discretionary and rule‐bound variety, co‐produces places through an attentiveness to, and sometimes an apparent dismissal of, spatiality. The essay notes the formative importance of studies on power and inequality within urban governance in this predominantly critical field. However, it also considers how the cross‐discipline is increasingly embracing legal geographic scholarship from within cultural, material and post‐human geographies. Adopting the metaphor of the ‘spatial detective’, the essay situates legal geography as a way of examining law's materialisation within space, considering the field's methods, core concepts and the potential directions in which they may evolve.