Page:ELO 1(1), 113–125. Here be dragons legal geography and EU law.pdf/1

European Law Open (2022), 1, 113–125 doi:10.1017/elo.2021.2 DIALOGUE AND DEBATE: SYMPOSIUM ON LEGAL GEOGRAPHY AND EU LAW

Floris de Witte


 * Abstract

1. Legal geography

Legal geography is a relatively new addition to the interdisciplinary catalogue of legal studies. It sits, unsurprisingly, at the intersection of law and geography. This means, essentially, that it is preoccupied with space. It employs a range of different methodologies to understand how law constructs space, and, conversely, how space affects law. These terms require some unpacking. What is meant by ‘space’ is not (only) its metaphysical connotation, but everything through which space manifests itself in our world – whether tangible or not: city streets, infrastructure networks, borders, rivers, forests, migration, wolves and hamsters. The term ‘law’, equally, has a wide connotation for most legal geographers, including statutes, case law, informal legal processes and conventions, but also political and institutional structures involved in lawmaking. In short, legal geographers are interested in how space co-creates law, and how law co-creates space.

The aims of legal geography are, essentially, to make visible how law affects what is around us, and vice versa. Legal scholars might intuitively be most attuned to the former: we know that law has the ability to shape the world in tangible and intangible ways. We also know that law can demarcate spaces for certain functions, or incentivise and sanction specific usage or relations. What we see outside our windows, and how we act in that space, is (also) a product of law. But legal scholars might be less intuitively attuned to how the causal arrow can be reversed: