Page:ELO 1(1), 113–125. Here be dragons legal geography and EU law.pdf/10

122   Floris de Witte Barbou des Places – is not explicitly spatial, it does come close. Its preoccupation with the way in which EU law constitutes and frames processes of formation and deconstruction – including the temporal dimension of concepts such as ‘social integration’ – echoes the legal geographers’ interest in the reflexive interaction between space, time and law. Political scientists have equally developed arguments that are sensitive to the spatial and temporal dynamics of EU institutional change.

This very general and short overview of where EU lawyers have ‘found space without having found geography’ is utterly incomplete. Luuk van Middelaar’s recent intervention, suggesting a geopolitical turn in the EU’s preoccupations, for example, explicitly engages with the themes of space and time, and focuses our attention towards geography in the way the EU (and not only EU law) operates. Thinking spatially about EU law could unearth buried treasures in endlessly diverse areas, including transport policy, industrial policy, cohesion policy or consumer law. It could focus on the legal regulation of tourism, professional sports, rental markets, geographical indications, GMOs, bioethics, European schools, health care or (transnational) families. It could also, more reflexively, engage with the internal functioning and dynamics of European institutions or national administrations and courtrooms faced with EU law – as historians have started to do. Other examples of aspects of EU law that are begging to be broached in spatial terms are cases such as Festersen (on the use of rural land for habitation as opposed to farming), Josemans (on drug tourism on the Belgo-Dutch border), Deutsche Apotheke (on the role of pharmacies in rural Germany), or the cases on the prohibition of megastores in Catalunya, the challenge to German motorway tolls or the destruction of the Polish Białowieża Forest. Recent cases on the habitat of wolves and hamsters, and on the regulation of hunting, could offer other starting points for aspiring legal geographers.

Overall, it is safe to say that the discipline of EU legal geography does not yet exist. The absence of scholarship on EU legal geography signifies that – as a discipline – EU legal studies continues to struggle in shifting its register away from questions of politics and policy and towards the detail, stories and lives that make up Europe, an exercise in which international law scholarship, and scholarship on European human rights law, have been much more successful. Some