Law's spatial turn: Geography, justice and a certain fear of space

Law, Culture and the Humanities

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 187-202

  Philippopoulos Mihalopoulos, Andreas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Law and geography; Law and space; Materiality; Spatial justice

Indexed keywords

EID: 79955081429     PISSN: 17438721     EISSN: 17439752     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1743872109355578     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring, 1986) 22-27.
2. If indeed it has ever been spatialized. As Doreen Massey writes at p. 17 of For Space (London: Sage, 2005), subsequently Massey, For Space, a decisive book for the kind of observations put forth here, "[spatial conceptions] are unpromising associations which connotationally deprive space of its most challenging characteristics.
3. Exceptions of course are both many and luminous, only a small part of which can be referred to in this article. It is, however, interesting but beyond the scope of this article to look at it from the perspective of different jurisdictions. Thus, an imperialist Anglo-American scholarship has been found to marginalize at least to some extent other scholarships: Nicholas Blomley notes the relevance of this for critical geography that aspires to internationalism and solidarity, reflexivity, and the analysis of power. (The Spaces of Critical Geography, Progress in Human Geography 32(2), (2008), 285-93, p. 290). One notes, for example, that Francophone or Italian spatial/legal scholarship systematically goes beyond this fear of abstraction, while at the same time dealing with the issues in hand.
4. Edward Soja, Taking Space Personally in Warf and Arias, The Spatial Turn; and indicatively, Massimo Cacciari, L'Arcipelago (Milano: Adelphi, 1997);
5. Franco Farinelli, Geografia (Torino: Einaudi, 2003);
6. Jean-Luc Nancy, Los Angeles ou La Ville au Loin (Paris: Fayard, 1999);
7. Mikhail Xifaras, La Propriété, Etude de Philosophie du Droit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004).
8. See also an interesting wave of theorization in Environmental and Property law: indicatively, Holder and Harrison, Law and Geography;
9. Desmond Manderson, ed., Law Text Culture, 9, 2005, special issue on Legal Spaces;
10. Mark Halsey, Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
11. In other words, fear is always fear of fear. I have dealt with this in Fear in the Lawscape, in Priban, ed., Bauman's Liquid Law and Society (Oxford: Hart, 2007), subsequently Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Fear.
12. This is the reason, I believe, for which potentially important books for law and space (such as Massey's For Space, or Edward Soja's, Thirdspace, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996) do not make any reference to law but simply to a generalized, politically mediated normativity.
13. Davina Cooper, Governing Out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging (New York: Rivers Oram, 1998), subsequently Cooper, Out of Order.
14. Barney Warf, From Surface to Networks in Warf and Arias, eds, The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2009);
15. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
16. Nicholas Blomley, Law, Space and the Geographies of Power (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1994), subsequently Blomley, Power.
17. David Delaney, Race, Place, and the Law, 1836-1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Cooper, Out of Order.
18. Mark Blacksell, Charles Watkins and Kim Economides, Human Geography and Law; A Case of Separate Developments in Social Sciences, Progress in Human Geography, 10(3) (1986) 371-96.
19. See, however, an attempt to form a flowing concept of jurisdiction by Richard Ford as simultaneously a material technology, a built environment and a discursive intervention in Law's Territory (A History of Jurisdiction), in Blomley, Delaney and Ford, eds, The Legal Geographies Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 201.
20. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso, 1990);
21. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (London: Routledge, 2001);
22. Alan Pred, The Past Is Not Dead: Facts, Fictions, and Enduring Racial Stereotypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
23. A valid point itself, but not conclusive, as Massey effectively argues in her World City (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) - a book about London and the world.
24. On the one hand space and places are increasingly the product of global flows; on the other hand we work with a politics both official and unofficial that is framed by a territorial imaginational and formal structure. Massey, World City, p. 14.
25. Zoe Pearson, Spaces of International Law, Griffith Law Review 17(2) (2008), 489-514;
26. Andrea Brighenti, On Territory as Relationship and Law as Territory, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 21, 2 (2006), pp. 65-86, for a countertheorization of space.
27. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, Beyond the Great Divide: Forms of Legal Scholarship and Everyday Life in Sarat and Kearns, eds, Law in Everyday Life (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1993), p. 5.
28. Sarat and Kearns refer to the concept and practice of everyday, but its distinctive spatial language and its import make it, at least for my purposes, tautological with the spatial.
29. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), p. 73.
30. David Delaney, Beyond the World: Law as a Thing of this World, in Holder and Harrison, eds, Law and Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
31. Subsequently Delaney, Beyond the World. The concept of the world, and consequently of Nancy's mondialisation or Luhmann's Weltgesellschaft, is different to the usual terrain of globalization.
32. Urs Stäheli, The Outside of the Global, New Centennial Review 3(2) (2003), 1-22
33. Thus succumbing to what Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), subsequently Lefebvre, Production, has called the fetishization of space.
34. This is a post-structural interpretation of Luhmann's ideas. See my Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society (London: Routledge, 2009).
35. This connection is not a new thing for law, but a coming-forth of what has already been there and whose origin can only retrospectively be located, even personally: Nicholas Blomley in From What?' to So What?': Law and Geography in Retrospect. in Holder and Harrison, Law and Geography, at p. 17, subsequently Blomley, From What, talks about how he has been working on the subject for nearly two decades.
36. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Absent Environments (London: Routledge, 2007);
37. Martti Koskenniemi, The Structure of International Legal Argument (Helsinki: Finnish Lawyers' Pub. Co., 1989) on how law's universal claim can only claim validity if the particular resonates in it.
38. Blomley, From What, p. 21.
39. Bradon Ellem and John Shields, Rethinking 'Regional Industrial Relations': Space, Place and the Social Relations of Work, Journal of Industrial Relations, 41(4) (1999), 536-60.
40. Lefebvre, Production, p. 73.
41. Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
42. Delaney, Beyond the World, p. 67, added emphasis.
43. David Cunningham, The Concept of Metropolis: Philosophy and Urban Form, Radical Philosophy, 133 (September/October 2005) 13-25, and Spacing Abstraction: Capitalism, Law and the Metropolis, Griffith Law Review, 17(2) (2008), 454-469.
44. Itself not entirely innocent - the example of European legal space seems to be illustrative of precisely this kind of territorial, bureaucratic and essentially jurisdictional authority. See the ECHR judicial exploration of the concept in Issa and Others v Turkey, Application 31821/96, Judgment 6 November 2004.
45. Peng Chea and Elizabeth Grosz, "The Body of the Law" in Chea, Fraser and Grbich, eds, Thinking through the Body of the Law (New York: New York University Press, 1996);
46. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996);
47. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
48. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City (New York: Guilford Press, 2003).
49. Delaney, Beyond the World, p. 80.
50. It is widely observed that the language of the material and the particular is no longer the prerogative of progressive politics but also of significant portions of conservative ideology. Whether this is simply rhetoric, it is simply irrelevant.
51. For Massey, through its parallel development with politics. For Space, pp. 10-12.
52. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003).
53. As Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey announce Without the law, critique would not exist, and vice versa. If law finds its destiny in its contestation, critique is bound constantly to become law. Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice (Oxford: Hart, 2005), p. 36.
54. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
55. In Lefebvre, Production, Lefebvre following Marx, considers space a concrete abstraction, namely an abstraction devoid of content and independent of context, which, however, can only be understood through a practice, a concretization that is linked to the space of everyday.
56. Chris Butler, Géographie critique du droit et production de l'espace: théorie et méthode selon l'oeuvre d'Henri Lefebvre, in Forest, ed., Géographie du Droit: Épistémologies, Dévelopements et Perspectives (Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2009).
57. Zoe Pearson, "Spaces of International Law", Griffith Law Review 17(2) (2008), 489-514;
58. Andrea Brighenti, On Territory as Relationship and Law as Territory, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 21(2) (2006), 65-86, for a countertheorization of space.
59. This is how the spatial turn has been understood in some disciplines, such as religion or indeed history: Santa Arias, The Geopolitics of Historiography from Europe to the Americas, in Warf and Arias, The Spatial Turn.
60. Sigurd Bergmann, Theology in its Spatial Turn, Religion Compass 1(3) (2007), 353-379.
61. One of course may legitimately wonder whether law is ready for this kind of spatialization.
62. Jacques Derrida, Adieu, trans. P. Brault and M. Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
63. Delaney's, Beyond the World, distinction between "law-in-space" and "space-in-law";
64. Piyel Haldar, In and out of Court: On topographies of Law and the Architecture of Court Buildings, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 7(2) (1994), 185-200,
65. Linda Mulcahy, Architects of Justice: the Politics of Courtroom Design, Social & Legal Studies 16(3) (2007), 383-403.
66. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey, eds, The Limits of Law (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
67. Terms that try to map this new territory include Blomley's splice (Blomley, From What), Delaney's nomosphere [Tracing Displacements: or Evictions in the Nomosphere, Society and Space 22, 6, (2004), 847-60] and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos's lawscape [In the Lawscape, in Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ed., Law and the City (London: Routledge, 2007)], all of which, more or less explicitly, trace the paradox between law and space.
68. Igor Stramignoni, Francesco's Devilish Venus: Notations on the Matter of Legal Space, California Western Law Review 41, 147-240, p. 173.
69. Stramignoni connects this space with the uniqueness of the event, thus bringing it closer to the temporal and the particular.
70. Mustafa Dikeç, Justice and the Spatial Imagination, Environment and Planning A 33, (2001), 1785-1805.
71. Massey, For Space, p. 14.
72. Massey, For Space, p. 113.
73. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 50.
74. Indeed, Massey explicitly talks about time and space in For Space, and Deleuze employs a Bergsonian conception of time in conjunction with space.
75. Suspension of Suspension: Settling for the Improbable, Law and Literature 15(3) (2003), 345-370, subsequently Suspension of Suspension.
76. Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority', trans. Michael Quaintance, in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D. Gray Carlson, eds, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 27, subsequently Derrida, Force.
77. The horizon becomes the limit from which I pre-comprehend the future. I wait for it. I predetermine it. And thus, I annul it. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, Donis and Webb, eds, trans. G. Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 20.
78. Christopher Stone, Ethics in International Environmental Law, in Bodansky, Brunnee and Hey, eds, Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
79. Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington, Justice Miscarried: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Law (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).
80. Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos: William Kaufmann, 1974);
81. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
82. Rosie Braidotti, Transpositions: on Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006);
83. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K. Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
84. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 65.
85. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 73.
86. Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (London: Blackwell, 2004).
87. Relationality with a potentially spatial element has been posited in Tarde's Monadologie et Sociologie (Paris: Empecheurs De Penser En Rond, 1999) and his philosophical move from being to having, with some interesting repercussions for property. See also Bruno Latour, Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social, in Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in the History and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002).
88. Iris Marion Young, The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference in Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Post-modernism (New York: Routledge, 1990).
89. Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000);
90. Desmond Manderson, Proximity, Levinas and the Soul of Law (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006);
91. Peter Goodrich, First we take Manhattan: Microtopia and Grammatology in Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ed., Law and the City (London: Routledge, 2007).
92. Stramignoni, Notations.
93. Derrida, Force, p. 28. Note that the calculation for Derrida refers not to law (the calculable par excellence), nor to justice, but to their relation. See also my analysis in Suspension of Suspension.
94. In other words, "the primordial scene of the nomos opens with a drawing of a line in the soil. This very act initiates a specific concept of law, which derives order from the notion of space."
95. Cornelia Vismann, Starting from Scratch: Concepts of Order in No Man's Land, in Huppauf, ed., War, Violence and the Modern Condition (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), p. 46.
96. Luhmann, Law as a Social System, trans. K. Ziegert, ed. F. Kastner, R. Nobles, D. Schiff and R. Ziegert (Oxford University Press, 2004) and further Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Absent Environments.
97. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Sharron A. FitzGerald, From Space Immaterial: The Invisibility of the Lawscape, Griffith Law Review 17, 2 (2008) 438-53.
98. Simone Weil, Waiting for God (London: Harper Perennial, 1992).
99. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969).