ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence and flourishing of an innovative approach to studies of the way in which law allocates property rights in land and regulates changes in land use and the physical environment. This approach, it will be argued, evolved in a small number of English law schools during the late-1960s and extended its influence through to the 1980s, when it began to fall from favour. The innovation arose essentially from the adoption of a sociologically determined object of inquiry. Rather than taking the relevant legislation as the frame for legal analysis, this approach took the phenomenon of urbanisation to be the critical object of investigation. Such an approach required a fundamental reorientation in the nature and purpose of legal study: if by urbanisation is meant the spatial consequences of the processes of social and economic change, then once this is taken as the object of legal inquiry, the range of questions about the role that law plays in those processes radically alters. The term I use for this reorientation of legal inquiry is ‘urban law’. I propose to focus my investigation in this paper on the work of Patrick McAuslan, the undisputed pioneer of this novel approach.
