Page:ELO 1(1), 113–125. Here be dragons legal geography and EU law.pdf/6

118   Floris de Witte has the potential to unearth an innovative and critical vocabulary and conceptual understanding of the process of European integration that firmly situates legal geography within what is probably its most essential dimension: the lived experience of European integration.

3. Space in EU Legal studies

EU legal studies has, for a long time, been the domain of doctrinal lawyers and constitutional lawyers – who have approached the discipline as relatively self-standing. More recently, however, EU legal studies has seen a ‘critical turn’ as well as an increase in empirical work, and a variety of interdisciplinary projects that have opened up EU law to new forms of engagement, critique and analysis. The recent collection edited by Mikael Madsen, Fernanda Nicola and Antoine Vauchez illustrates the richness and diversity of methods that could be used to make sense of EU law and its environment.

Even if there is little coherence, or any self-reflective identification with the project of legal geography, some contributions can be found that focus on questions related to legal geography throughout EU law; these are widely dispersed throughout the many substantive areas on which EU law focuses. EU legal studies has, in other words, since around 2010, increasingly ‘found space without having found geography’. There has been an increase in attention to space in EU law – in certain sites specifically. But bar a handful of contributions that will be discussed, these have been analysed and critiqued without the explicit spatial focus and reflexive awareness that characterises legal geography. Likewise, human and population geographers, but also ethnographers, anthropologists, migration scholars and criminologists, have increasingly focused on the effects ‘on the ground’ of certain EU policies, such as the Habitats Directive or the fisheries policy, or on the EU’s external borders; however, they usually understand EU law as a ‘black box’ that operates in isolation from the social context to which it applies. This section sketches a few of the many diverse areas in which EU law has ‘found space’, and it hints at the questions that a legal geographer might ask in order to enrich current research in EU legal studies.

The first and most obvious space in EU law is borders: the EU’s internal and external borders. Free movement has, evidently, always been a core research question for EU lawyers. Recently, some of its more explicitly spatial dimensions have been brought into focus, such as transnational solidarity, extradition, and labour and student mobility. Even in these more ‘spatial’ contributions, however, EU law is usually understood as hegemonic, as exclusive, in its determination of social space and social relations. The reality of the places, spaces and relations that it affects, in other words, only enters the picture as context (at best). One important exception is the work of Andrea Iossa and Maria Persdotter. In 2021, they published an account of social dumping and labour mobility in the EU, explicitly situating these questions within the framework of legal geography. Scholars from surrounding disciplines, meanwhile, have offered insightful studies on specific forms of mobility, ranging from the movement of Somalis from the Netherlands to the