ABSTRACT
Following Irus Braverman’s (2014) call for a methodological turn in legal geography, research methods are receiving increased attention from scholars. Yet what this means for the study of lawyers within the legal geography literature is unclear. This chapter has two objectives. First, it considers some of the challenges and opportunities facing legal geography researchers who wish to examine the insights of lawyers in their work. Drawing on coal seam gas (CSG) literature and existing legal geography analyses which have made use of lawyer perspectives, this chapter surveys obstacles to securing access to lawyer voices in legal geography research, while also addressing how this challenge might be negotiated to ensure fruitful outcomes. Building on this, the chapter then addresses the possibility of investigating lawyer perspectives through the prism of submissions authored by legal professionals for a CSG-related government inquiry, raising socio-spatial questions about the geographical scope of compensation for landholders in the process. This case study reveals that lawyers are not only active participants in Australia’s CSG debate but are also the purveyors of legal advice for a variety of interest groups, who may then seek to utilise lawyers’ opinions to support their own advocacy efforts on the subject.
