Page:ELO 1(1), 126–130. On legal geography as an analytical toolbox for eu legal studies.pdf/2

Rh mediated by various spatial and biophysical factors. As de Witte notes, a substantial corpus of EU law deals with pre-eminently ‘spatial matters’: agriculture, environmental protection, transportation, waste management – and, of course, the ostensibly ‘free movements’ of goods, capital, services, and people. The lexicon of EU law is also full of inherently geographical terms and concepts: ‘circulation’, ‘free movement’, ‘internal market’, ‘regions’, and ‘territory’. We agree with de Witte that legal geography offers an especially productive analytical toolbox to explore the different fields of EU law, and to understand ‘what it means to live under EU law’. In this short response, we wish to emphasise and elaborate on some of de Witte arguments, and to offer some examples of how we have made use of the analytical tools of legal geography in our own work.

2. Where do we come from?

There is a personal aspect to the story of how we each found our way to the space of legal geography. We met while we were doctoral students in urban studies and European labour law, respectively. We became friends and later partners, but we also discovered that there was some overlap between our respective PhD research projects in so far as they both dealt with the geographies of labour and social rights in the EU. In our conversations, we also found that it was quite enriching to work across the divides between our respective disciplines. In our joint and separate work, we have made use of the analytical resources of legal geography to re-conceptualise the problem of social dumping and, more broadly, to explore the multi-scalar regulation of ‘work on the move’ in the EU, especially within the logistics and transport sectors. We have also done work on internal bordering in the context of intra-European so-called poverty migration.

3. Starting from the ground up

Legal geography, as de Witte notes, is not a solidified sub-discipline, nor a systematic methodology. As the title of our response suggests, we prefer to think of it as a conceptual and analytical toolbox. It is also a way of asking questions, a particular ‘ethos of investigation’: a context-sensitive, empirically oriented and reflexive approach that is simultaneously attentive to the detailed workings of law. De Witte suggests that legal geographic analysis allows for an exploration of the everyday experience of ‘[living] under EU law’ and, with that, a better understanding of (popular) resistance to the project of EU integration. He is right in this. EU integration is not an a-spatial or ‘extra-territorial’ process; it does not unfold in an abstract space above or beyond the concrete geographies of everyday life. This fact is made clear by the evolving meaning of the concept of ‘territory of the Union’ in relation to the possibilities of individuals to exercise and claim rights attached to EU citizenship status. This, in a nutshell, is why it is useful to approach the study of EU law using the toolbox of legal geography.