Legal geography I: Constitutivities, complexities, and contingencies

Abstract

Although it has been a recognized tendency in human geography and socio-legal studies for nearly 20 years, the project of legal geography has expanded significantly in the last five years in terms of participants, topics of investigation, and theoretical elaboration. This initial report on legal geography emphasizes recent work by geographers, especially younger scholars, and is addressed to the wider community of human geographers. It seeks to convey a sense of the expanded scope of research over the last few years through a discussion of key themes of constitutivity, complexity, and contingency. It suggests that, in many cases, closer critical scrutiny of the involvement of distinctively legal phenomena in the events of particular interest to human geographers can open up productive lines of inquiry that are foreclosed by the conventional neglect of the legal in human geography.