ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the development of sexual regulations and the contemporary legal landscape. It demonstrates that despite both states legalizing brothels, there are important differences. The regulatory regime surrounding sex work in New South Wales (NSW) is far more neoliberal in its approach than the US, including Nevada. Nevada and NSW have made different choices regarding local versus regional regulation and in their reliance on policing versus planning. While Nevada's rural brothels are legal, they still operate in a context where sex work is considered a vice and in need of specific regulations. The concept of nomosphere emphasizes that law and space should not be considered as binary categories, but rather a call to pay attention to the complex reciprocal materialization of the legal and the spatial. The different spatial, legal, and moral geographies of prostitution in Nevada and sex work in NSW highlight the imbrication of law and space in the construction, expression and communication of meaning.
