ABSTRACT
Every day, we see the effects of law on the landscape and the environment. Much writing within geography focuses on measuring and understanding the impacts of particular environmental laws, with much less attention paid to a critical understanding of legal geographies (Mustafa 2001). Some geographers have studied effects of international environmental agreements (see e.g. Marchak 1995; Soroos 1999; Demeritt 2001). Many studies linking legal causes to geographic effects have been done in the areas of civil rights and the urban form (see e.g. Mitchell 1997; Blomley 1998; Mitchell 1998). Environmental justice literature examines the social and environmental effects of legal processes. These studies look at the ties of risk and harm to class and race (Beck 1992; Bowen, Salling et al. 1995), engage scale as a social construct (Kurtz 2002; Kurtz 2003), and place space in a functional relationship with both ideas and the law (Pulido 2000).
