Page:ELO 1(1), 113–125. Here be dragons legal geography and EU law.pdf/8

120   Floris de Witte likewise, offer very rich research on what happens ‘on the ground’ on these sites, without necessarily appreciating the contingent nature of the sites’ legal regulation.

A second site of recent spatial interest for EU lawyers has been the city. The work of Michèle Finck and Fernanda Nicola, for example, sheds light on the role of subnational actors in the (constitutional) governance of the EU, and their role as sites for the mediation of EU law within local, spatial peculiarities. Tommaso Pavone has undertaken work on how local culture, identity and context affect judges and their engagement with EU law through the preliminary reference procedure. Giacomo Tagiuri, in his research, looks at how EU law affects licensing and zoning rules, and their impact on local cultural and local identities, particularly in the urban setting. The work by Ran Hirschl and Saskia Sassen, equally, focuses in very different ways on the framework within which global cities emerged and are constituted. Most of this work is rooted in the constitutional or socio-legal tradition. Meanwhile, Antonia Layard, one of the few scholars who is both well versed in EU law and legal geography, has recently put the study of ‘urban law’ on the map in Europe. Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez’s work on ‘the Mall’ equally uses an explicit spatial perspective to analyse the way in which the legal regulation of particular places impacts on anti-discrimination norms and fundamental rights. Just as is the case for scholars of urban law, legal geographers are drawn to cities: cities constitute places where a large number of legal demands collide – from consumer protection and housing to health and safety; from zoning rules to infrastructural demands; and where problems related to inequality and race are particularly pronounced and often explicitly spatial.

A third type of space that EU lawyers are increasingly ‘finding’ relates to more-than-humans and the environment, even if this still remains primarily the domain of geographers and