ABSTRACT
This penultimate chapter pauses to provide an alternative way of looking at the themes of this book. It compares the development of Legal History to the field of legal geography. It explores how that field has developed, the differences and similarities with Legal History and what insights can be developed to further refine Subversive Legal History. This chapter puts forward three reasons for exploring how legal geography has developed. First, the criticisms often made by geographers about the focus on time over space highlight the problems of everyday history (rather than academic history) and its assumption of evolutionary functionalism. Second, works on legal geography highlight that a subversive approach should not be limited to the use of history but should include geographical approaches subverting space as well as time. Third,legal historians have much to learn from how legal geography has developed. Legal geography developed a critical approach and the critical movement had a different effect there than upon Legal History. Legal geography developed as a movement without the institutional trappings and became a sub-discipline of neither law nor geography. Rather, it has become a post-disciplinary critique. This chapter suggests that Subversive Legal History could adopt a similar trajectory and concludes by looking at Mariana Valverde’s work on chronotopes which subjects time to the same critical scrutiny as space.
