Page:ELO 1(1), 113–125. Here be dragons legal geography and EU law.pdf/7

Rh UK, to Erasmus or Brexit, and from the exercise of free movement for reasons of love to reasons of work. Usually, here, EU law is taken as a vector in facilitating or inhibiting mobility ‘on the ground’, but with little regard to the contradictions, complications, uncertainties and exceptions that lawyers see throughout EU free movement law, and which affect and are affected by the spatial characteristics of different parts of the EU.

The legal geography at the EU’s external borders is perhaps more interesting, as it is regulated in a piecemeal way, is relatively ill-defined and allows for the interaction between very diverse sites, actors and types of movement. Two examples come to mind. The first is the work on the reach of the EU’s jurisdiction, or, if you will, its ‘legal boundaries’ and their capacity for extraterritorial effect. In other words, EU law frames social interactions and spaces far beyond its borders, as the work of Anu Bradford and Joanne Scott highlights. Other scholars, such as Ayelet Schachar and Hans Lindahl, have approached this same question from a more theoretical (and international law) perspective, offering similar insights into the unstable nature of borders and the re-emergence of the state through the recasting and re-placing of space and borders. The insights offered by these scholars could serve as invaluable groundwork for EU legal geographers keen to understand what happens when EU law operates in places, and regulates interactions, far beyond the context for which it was intended. The second example of work on the EU’s external borders that might be of interest deals with the ill-defined borderlands where national law, EU powers, Frontex and refugees collide; with a particular emphasis on specific sites such as the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, and on large-scale refugee sites such as Moria or the Białowieża Forest. Legal scholars have questioned the scope of EU norms in this context, the power of actors and the range of rights that should apply in these contexts. With very few exceptions, however, they have not yet taken an explicitly spatial approach, focusing on the way in which the specificities of these diverse sites affect the legal regime and actors, and, conversely, how law renders or understands these borderlands. Migration scholars and criminologists,