Law, Space & Place

Antonia Layard,

University of Bristol Law School

”Law is a profoundly

anti-geographical faith

… In law the entire

world is transmuted into

one vast isotropic

surface, its peoples

sovereign (Anglo-

Saxon) individuals,

subjects of LAW”

Pue, 1990

splice

encoding of legal and

spatial meanings

Blomley, 2003

lawscape

“The description of the lawscape

-any lawscape- initiates a complex

discussion on the itinerant manner in

which the city appropriates the law and

the law the city: a line of passage that

transverses both the text and its syntax,

aiming for a utopia whose topos has

returned but whose emplacement

remains perpetually postponed.”

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2007

Lawscape explores

the relationship

between the

abstractness of

property law and and

the physical materiality

of place” … the

“dephysicalisation”

thesis.

Graham, 2010

nomosphere

‘the nomosphere is a way of

thinking about the complex,

shifting, and always interpretable

blendings of words and worlds, in

which our lives are always

embedded and unfolding’.

Delaney, 2010

work

“the world is not given to us, but actively

made through orderings which offer

powerful “maps” of the social world,

classifying, coding and categorizing. In so

doing a particular reality is created...

Similarly, space offers a powerful ordering

framework. The boundary, which

delineates and defines .... is a vital

modality of ordering. Space comes with

particular and deeply encoded

classifications of encoded behaviour”

Blomley, 2003

chronotope

“Bakthin's notion of the 'chronotope',

which he describes as concrete "space-

time envelopes" ...

However, the spatial aspect is not

explored, a fact that reinforces the

dualism that has anthropologists

worrying about temporality while

geographers and law-and-space scholars

worry only about space”.

Valverde, 2015

everyday

spatial detectives

We suggest that there is much to learn by both

legal scholars and geographers becoming

‘spatial detectives’ – of learning, Sherlock

Holmes-like, to search out the presence and

absence of spatialities in legal practice and of

law’s traces and effects embedded within

places.

Bennett and Layard, 2015

place

“a sense of belonging

for those who live in

them, and are seen as

providing a locus for

identity”

Hubbard et al, 2012

place is “more than just an event”. It is the “materialization of a history which is often quite extensively retracted”

Williams, Politics & Letters (2015)

“If you stand, today, in between Town

Road, you can see either way: west to

the spires and towers of the cathedral

and colleges; east to the yards and

sheds of the minor works. You see

different worlds, but there is no frontier

between them; there is only the

movement and traffic of a single city.”

Williams, 1988

“… here I was actually at the door which leads

into the library itself. I must have opened it, for

instantly there issued, like a guardian angel

barring the way with a flutter of black

gown instead of white wings, a deprecating,

silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low

voice as he waved me back that ladies are only

admitted to the library if accompanied by a

Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of

introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a

woman is a matter of complete indifference to a

famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its

treasures safe locked within its breast, it

sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am

concerned, so sleep for ever.” Woolf, 1929

References

Luke Bennett and Antonia Layard, "Legal geography: becoming spatial detectives." Geography

compass 9.7 (2015): 406-422.

Nicholas Blomley, "From what?’to ‘so what’: law and geography in retrospect." Law and geography 5

(2003): 17-33

Nicholas Blomley, "Law, property, and the geography of violence: The frontier, the survey, and the

grid." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93.1 (2003): 121-141.

David Delaney, The spatial, the legal and the pragmatics of world-making: Nomospheric

investigations. Routledge, 2010.

Nicole Graham, Lawscape: property, environment, law. Routledge, 2010.

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos Introduction to the volume (ed.), In the Lawscape Law and the

City, London: Routledge, 2007

Wesley Pue, Wrestling with Law: (Geographical) Specificity vs. (Legal) Abstraction”, 1990

Mariana Valverde, Chronotopes of law: Jurisdiction, scale and governance. Routledge, 2015.

Raymond Williams, Books and Letters, Verso 2015

Raymond Williams, Second Generation, Random House, 2013

Virginia Woolf, A room of one's own and three guineas. OUP Oxford, 2015.