Page:ELO 1(1), 113–125. Here be dragons legal geography and EU law.pdf/2

114   Floris de Witte how space also co-creates law. The determinations, assumptions, frames and rhetoric used ‘in’ law are always situated in the social world – it is tightly intermeshed with the spaces, places and times where law is created and law is, in a way, a response to these constraints and conditions. In other words, law is born out of a particular setting, which can be understood politically and socioeconomically, but also in terms of space and time. These latter categories are of interest to legal geographers.

What this reflexive sensitivity of legal geography suggests is that law is perhaps less determinative than we might expect as legal scholars: it is not something that is drafted in offices, whereby law ‘on the books’ seamlessly translates into law ‘in the streets’ (or in a forest, in outer space, in the practice of hunting or fishing). Legal geographers pay close attention to the contingency of the spatial application of law and the agency of actors faced with that law.

Legal geographers are a motley crew. They consist mainly of occasional visitors from ethnography, anthropology and human geography as well as critical geography, and include planning lawyers, political scientists, socio-legal scholars, critical legal scholars, environmental lawyers and policy scholars. It is not easy to determine (bar a few exceptions) which scholars are self-consciously engaged in legal geography. Partially, this is a reflection of the field’s genuinely interdisciplinary nature, but also of its ill-defined scope: it is a discipline that includes questions of the legal determination of outer space, questions of indigenous jurisdiction in Indonesia, the wolf population in Finland or the history of cars in the suburban United States (USA). While this is, in my view, one of its strengths and attractions, it is also a challenge for a field in construction.

Much of the work of legal geographers has, for lack of a material definition of what legal geography entails, focused on the method of the discipline: what does it mean to ‘do’ legal geography? What defines, if anything, the discipline of legal geography? In the most general terms, it appears that legal geographers mix the focus on agency – on the details, the spatial and material – from geography and ethnography with the affinity for the structuring and determinative character of legal studies. More specifically, three characteristics stand out. First, legal geographers ‘think spatially’. This spatial (and temporal) sensibility entails a shift in orientation for legal scholars: rather than thinking about the law that is somehow superimposed or ‘dumped’ on a specific site, we should think about how law is created by and creates a specific place or incentivises specific relationships within that place. If we walk through a newly constructed neighbourhood, lawyers might think of traffic rules, public procurement or terms in mortgage contracts. Legal geographers see how regulations on noise pollution affected the shape of the houses, how municipal decisions on public transport determine the socio-economic composition of the population, or how the proximity to a forest might lead to a de facto disapplication of municipal rules for waste disposal by the inhabitants. ‘Thinking spatially’ requires attention being paid to how space is given