ABSTRACT
Legal geography has developed as a field of study over a few decades, gaining increasing recognition for its role in providing a critical forum for analysis of law-space-society relations. Although there are antecedents in kin disciplines of critical legal studies, law and society and legal anthropology (e.g. Davies 2017; von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2009), legal geography has drawn its own lines on the scholarly map for some time now. Nicholas Blomley’s (1994) seminal work Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power was perhaps the first comprehensive review of scholarship that brought together the concept of legal geography/geographies. Blomley (1994, p.51) explains that these critical geographies “seek to reconstruct the law-space nexus so as to accord proper recognition to both and to affirm the complex interplay of the two, evaluating the manner in which legal practice serves to produce space yet, in turn, is shaped by a sociospatial context”. A recent succession of review papers (Bartel et al. 2013; Bennett & Layard 2015; Delaney 2015a; Delaney 2015b; Delaney 2017), journal special issues (Bartel et al. 2013; Graham & Bartel 2016; Robinson & Graham 2018) and books including Braverman (2014), have highlighted the development of this field since its clear culmination in the mid-1990s. Recent entanglements with scholarship in, for example, feminist geography (Cuomo & Brickell 2019, Brickell & Cuomo 2019; Perry & Gillespie 2019), environmental law research methods (Brooks & Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2017), political ecology (Andrews & McCarthy 2014; Salgo & Gillespie 2018; O’Donnell 2019) and feminist political ecology (Gillespie & Perry 2019), point to an increasingly conceptually mature approach. As a scholarly field, legal geography has now moved beyond its adolescence, into a richer level of maturity. Our aim with this book is to add to this enrichment in legal geography research.
