Page:ELO 1(1), 113–125. Here be dragons legal geography and EU law.pdf/12

124   Floris de Witte Galicia, the villages next to the entrance to the Channel Tunnel or seagulls in coastal Britain) or a particular piece of legislation, or case or regulation. Much of the work that currently falls within this category focuses on environmental justice – elaborating on the way in which EU law affects its environment and its actors. This is perhaps a legacy of its interest to geographers and the relative absence of legal scholars ‘thinking spatially’. Law, however, could have an important role to play in framing empirical observations, and quantitative or qualitative work; and in extrapolating the more general aspects in which law and space interact. The methods that come more naturally to legal scholars – case law analysis, for example – could do the same, and offer important starting points for understanding how the CJEU frames certain sites, spaces or actors. The edited collection by Nicola and Bill Davies on the stories behind crucial cases in EU law, albeit lacking the explicitly spatial frame, is a wonderful example of how such detailed analysis could enrich more general accounts of the nature of EU law.

A good illustration of empirical legal geographical research with a focus on EU law is the article by Bareli, Geelhoed, Parks, Morgera and Tsioumani on the way in which the CAP, EU animal welfare and food standards regulations have affected the life of pastoralists in Ikaria – in economic, social and cultural terms. Their research combines qualitative research, including interviews, with legal positivism, and displays an acute spatial sensibility, clearly framing the EU norms in question as ‘creating’ new spaces and relationships while simultaneously highlighting the way in which the specifics of Ikaria – in terms of landscapes, social relationships, cultural practices – irritate or mediate the application of those very norms. Ultimately, the authors argue, the tools that EU law has at its disposal do not appear able to internalise this reflexive tension. Work such as this is absolutely necessary in EU law. It offers us ways of thinking about the nature, limits and capacity of EU law that is invaluable at a time where the role of law is being re-thought like never before in the process of integration.

In their introduction to the edited collection entitled The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, the editors – the great and the good of legal geography – suggest that while legal geography has often focused on disciplinary cross-pollination and explicit interdisciplinarity; the next frontier should be a type of post-disciplinary scholarship that does not look at law or at geography for inspiration as to the questions to be asked or the methods to be used. This has fostered the emergence of terms such as ‘lawscape’ or ‘nomosphere’, which capture intricate interactions between space, time and law. In EU legal geography, arguable, these terms and the approach could translate quite well. Simply put, there is something deeply transformative, in both spatial and temporal dimensions, about EU law that connects quite naturally to (legal) geography. This could come to the fore most explicitly in a third type of EU legal geography, focusing on concepts that articulate how the reflexive interaction between EU law and space both literally and metaphorically reshapes Europe. This could be by focusing on concepts whose register consist of spatial, temporal, conceptual and normative usages. An example could be to analyse concepts such as liveability, increasingly used to frame contemporary urban life. Concepts such as wilderness, localism, order, public, integration or tradition could be other interesting starting points.