As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring... more As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring
together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study
set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and
sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations
between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf
must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two
territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human,
and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making
of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for
humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking
regarding territory
Legal spaces are said to be a crucial materialization of law, serving to communicate legal meanin... more Legal spaces are said to be a crucial materialization of law, serving to communicate legal meaning and, in so doing, helping to produce a liberal–legal consciousness. Given its centrality to legal ordering and liberal ideology, the spatial manifestation of the public–private divide, especially when related to property, would appear to be particularly important in this regard. Public and private are assumed to be both mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Drawing upon empirical research conducted in a neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada, I argue that spatial and legal categories such as public and private may be more fluid than one might suppose. While the public/private divide is clearly powerful, and informs much policy and governmental action, it is not necessarily the case that it has the purchase on everyday life that some scholars have suggested. People may live in more complicated and overlapping worlds when it comes to supposedly determinate categories such as property.
The author seeks to make sense of the political and ethical cleavages
associated with inner city ... more The author seeks to make sense of the political and ethical cleavages associated with inner city gentrification in Vancouver, by an examination of the differing perspectives on real property deployed by the opposing constituencies. He identifies a marked division between dominant and community-based readings of property as an economic, political and legal category, associated with opposed visions of space, place and history. Conclusions are drawn relating to the significance of a geographically informed theorization of decentred legalities, and the complex politics of power, resistance and domination.
Legal geography is a stream of scholarship that takes the interconnections between law and spatia... more Legal geography is a stream of scholarship that takes the interconnections between law and spatiality, and especially their reciprocal construction, as core objects of inquiry. Legal geographers contend that in the world of lived social relations and experience, aspects of the social that are analytically identified as either legal or spatial are conjoined and co-constituted. The legal geography scholarship highlights that nearly every aspect of law is either located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference. In other words, law is always “worlded” in some way. Likewise, every bit of social space, lived places, and landscapes are inscribed with legal significance. Distinctively legal forms of meaning are projected onto every segment of the physical world. These meanings are open to interpretation and may become involved in a range of legal practices. Such fragments of a socially segmented world — the where of law — are not simply the inert sites of law, but are inextricably implicated in how law happens.
This introduction to the forthcoming book The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press) identifies and elaborates on three modes of legal geographic research. The first mode of legal geography includes disciplinary work in law or in geography that is modeled on the conventional image of import and export. The second is an interdisciplinary pursuit in which scholars in the eponymous fields draw on the work of each other and seek to contribute to the development of a common project. The third mode moves beyond legal geography to trans-disciplinary, or perhaps even post-disciplinary, modes of scholarship. Although these three modes exist concurrently, the general trajectory over time has been from disciplinary to interdisciplinary and, finally, to post-disciplinary orientations. This triadic classification helps organize the rich yet eclectic legal geography scholarship that has evolved over the last thirty years or so. While this introduction contains elements of each mode, it also urges interested scholars to move legal geography beyond the disciplinary boundaries into the horizons of a post-legal geography. Ironically, then, the ultimate success of legal geography will be in its ability to transcend the bi-disciplinary focus that has characterized so much of this scholarship up to this point.
In addition to the introduction, the book consists of ten chapters. In the first three, Keebet and the late Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Mariana Valverde, and Nicholas Blomley identify gaps and obstacles in existing approaches to legal geography scholarship and offer remedies. An important sub-theme in each of these chapters is the importance of being more mindful of the temporalities of social, spatial, and legal phenomena. Authored by Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar and Irus Braverman, the next two chapters ask how a critical comparative legal geography might not only draw upon but also contribute to a rejuvenated project of comparative law and the methodological stakes of legal geography scholarship. The remaining five chapters expand legal geography into new spaces and make new connections. Specifically, Michael Smith, Antonio Azuela and Rodrigo Meneses, Lisa Pruitt, Melinda Benson, and David Delaney develop novel interpretive resources with the aim of enhancing interdisciplinarity, applying these tools to particular kinds of spaces and places: war zones, the street, the workplace, American rurality, and procedural spaces.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2004
Hock E Aye Vi (Edgar Heap of Birds) is an artist of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent, whose uncomprom... more Hock E Aye Vi (Edgar Heap of Birds) is an artist of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent, whose uncompromising art challenges colonial history and contemporary realities in unsettling and creative ways. He has placed provocative public art in cities across North America, including Seattle, ...
... See Smith, supra note 4; M. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. ... ... more ... See Smith, supra note 4; M. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. ... A political refugee from Zimbabwe, Ntombi Mayaba, was quoted as arguing that more social housing will only promote what are called ghettoes and that will breed ugliness. ...
... within, Borders are a tool that differentiates those included fram those who are not, and are... more ... within, Borders are a tool that differentiates those included fram those who are not, and are utilized, as Denise Blane Oleksilczuk eloquently ... and Elaine Kyllo have brought to every aspect of this publication's production, This is the first time that McCarthy Tetrault LLP has ...
A draft version of a chapter in an forthcoming book on commons, this paper draws from CB Macphers... more A draft version of a chapter in an forthcoming book on commons, this paper draws from CB Macpherson's concept of common property as the right to not be excluded in order to make sense of the enduring and heroic struggle against gentrification-induced displacement in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
The pervasive and important territorial dimensions of property are understudied, given the tenden... more The pervasive and important territorial dimensions of property are understudied, given the tendency to view territory through the lens of the state. Viewing both property and territory as relational, and mutually recursive, I introduce the practical work of property’s territory, the historical moment in which it was produced, the powerful metaphors that work through it, and the habits and everyday practices it induces. The territory of property, I suggest, has a specificity, a presence, and a consequentiality all of which demand our attention.
As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring... more As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human, and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking regarding territory
Property is a crucial means by which space is made, and remade. This is powerfully evident in set... more Property is a crucial means by which space is made, and remade. This is powerfully evident in settler societies, such as British Columbia, Canada. To understand the work that it does requires us to attend to the manner in which it is entangled in and constitutive of a multitude of relations (ethical, practical, historical, semantic and so on). Yet for property to function, some of these relationships must be bracketed. That which is designated as inside a boundary must be partly disentangled from that identified as outside. Property practice and theory helps organize these exclusions. Yet this is not disinterested: Property’s frames, therefore, can become political battle lines.
Drawing from a modern-day treaty process involving indigenous communities and the federal and provincial governments in British Columbia, Canada, I trace the ways in which the state has sought to disentangle property from its recently re-emergent colonial entanglements. One of the ways in which it has done this is to insist that First Nations hold their treaty settlement lands as a form of fee simple, this being bracketed as a clear and certain entitlement, replacing a messier ‘Aboriginal title’. First Nations negotiators, however, have pushed back, re-entangling fee simple in culture, politics and place. I explore the performative use of categorization on the part of the Crown in their attempt at re-framing fee simple as ‘simple’. Apart from documenting this understudied postcolonial moment, I also encourage geographers to recognize the important work that property does in making space. To do so, I theorize property as an effect, performed through multiple technical and categorical enactments.
Abstract: (forthcoming in Annual Review of Law and Social Science) Following the call to focus on... more Abstract: (forthcoming in Annual Review of Law and Social Science) Following the call to focus on law as a set of practices, I develop Callon’s concept of framing (which I refer to here as bracketing) in relation to law. Bracketing refers to the process of delimiting a sphere within which interactions take place more or less independently of a surrounding context. To do so is to temporarily rearrange the relations that constitute legal reality. A legal contract, for example, draws certain objects and relationships into sharper focus, ignoring or deliberately excluding others. I offer several examples of legal bracketing, some foundational, others highly routinized, and note several distinctive characteristics. I then use bracketing to think about legal categorization, law as effect (rather than essence), law’s success, and the heterogeneity found within a legal frame.
As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring... more As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring
together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study
set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and
sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations
between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf
must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two
territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human,
and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making
of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for
humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking
regarding territory
Legal spaces are said to be a crucial materialization of law, serving to communicate legal meanin... more Legal spaces are said to be a crucial materialization of law, serving to communicate legal meaning and, in so doing, helping to produce a liberal–legal consciousness. Given its centrality to legal ordering and liberal ideology, the spatial manifestation of the public–private divide, especially when related to property, would appear to be particularly important in this regard. Public and private are assumed to be both mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Drawing upon empirical research conducted in a neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada, I argue that spatial and legal categories such as public and private may be more fluid than one might suppose. While the public/private divide is clearly powerful, and informs much policy and governmental action, it is not necessarily the case that it has the purchase on everyday life that some scholars have suggested. People may live in more complicated and overlapping worlds when it comes to supposedly determinate categories such as property.
The author seeks to make sense of the political and ethical cleavages
associated with inner city ... more The author seeks to make sense of the political and ethical cleavages associated with inner city gentrification in Vancouver, by an examination of the differing perspectives on real property deployed by the opposing constituencies. He identifies a marked division between dominant and community-based readings of property as an economic, political and legal category, associated with opposed visions of space, place and history. Conclusions are drawn relating to the significance of a geographically informed theorization of decentred legalities, and the complex politics of power, resistance and domination.
Legal geography is a stream of scholarship that takes the interconnections between law and spatia... more Legal geography is a stream of scholarship that takes the interconnections between law and spatiality, and especially their reciprocal construction, as core objects of inquiry. Legal geographers contend that in the world of lived social relations and experience, aspects of the social that are analytically identified as either legal or spatial are conjoined and co-constituted. The legal geography scholarship highlights that nearly every aspect of law is either located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference. In other words, law is always “worlded” in some way. Likewise, every bit of social space, lived places, and landscapes are inscribed with legal significance. Distinctively legal forms of meaning are projected onto every segment of the physical world. These meanings are open to interpretation and may become involved in a range of legal practices. Such fragments of a socially segmented world — the where of law — are not simply the inert sites of law, but are inextricably implicated in how law happens.
This introduction to the forthcoming book The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press) identifies and elaborates on three modes of legal geographic research. The first mode of legal geography includes disciplinary work in law or in geography that is modeled on the conventional image of import and export. The second is an interdisciplinary pursuit in which scholars in the eponymous fields draw on the work of each other and seek to contribute to the development of a common project. The third mode moves beyond legal geography to trans-disciplinary, or perhaps even post-disciplinary, modes of scholarship. Although these three modes exist concurrently, the general trajectory over time has been from disciplinary to interdisciplinary and, finally, to post-disciplinary orientations. This triadic classification helps organize the rich yet eclectic legal geography scholarship that has evolved over the last thirty years or so. While this introduction contains elements of each mode, it also urges interested scholars to move legal geography beyond the disciplinary boundaries into the horizons of a post-legal geography. Ironically, then, the ultimate success of legal geography will be in its ability to transcend the bi-disciplinary focus that has characterized so much of this scholarship up to this point.
In addition to the introduction, the book consists of ten chapters. In the first three, Keebet and the late Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Mariana Valverde, and Nicholas Blomley identify gaps and obstacles in existing approaches to legal geography scholarship and offer remedies. An important sub-theme in each of these chapters is the importance of being more mindful of the temporalities of social, spatial, and legal phenomena. Authored by Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar and Irus Braverman, the next two chapters ask how a critical comparative legal geography might not only draw upon but also contribute to a rejuvenated project of comparative law and the methodological stakes of legal geography scholarship. The remaining five chapters expand legal geography into new spaces and make new connections. Specifically, Michael Smith, Antonio Azuela and Rodrigo Meneses, Lisa Pruitt, Melinda Benson, and David Delaney develop novel interpretive resources with the aim of enhancing interdisciplinarity, applying these tools to particular kinds of spaces and places: war zones, the street, the workplace, American rurality, and procedural spaces.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2004
Hock E Aye Vi (Edgar Heap of Birds) is an artist of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent, whose uncomprom... more Hock E Aye Vi (Edgar Heap of Birds) is an artist of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent, whose uncompromising art challenges colonial history and contemporary realities in unsettling and creative ways. He has placed provocative public art in cities across North America, including Seattle, ...
... See Smith, supra note 4; M. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. ... ... more ... See Smith, supra note 4; M. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. ... A political refugee from Zimbabwe, Ntombi Mayaba, was quoted as arguing that more social housing will only promote what are called ghettoes and that will breed ugliness. ...
... within, Borders are a tool that differentiates those included fram those who are not, and are... more ... within, Borders are a tool that differentiates those included fram those who are not, and are utilized, as Denise Blane Oleksilczuk eloquently ... and Elaine Kyllo have brought to every aspect of this publication's production, This is the first time that McCarthy Tetrault LLP has ...
A draft version of a chapter in an forthcoming book on commons, this paper draws from CB Macphers... more A draft version of a chapter in an forthcoming book on commons, this paper draws from CB Macpherson's concept of common property as the right to not be excluded in order to make sense of the enduring and heroic struggle against gentrification-induced displacement in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
The pervasive and important territorial dimensions of property are understudied, given the tenden... more The pervasive and important territorial dimensions of property are understudied, given the tendency to view territory through the lens of the state. Viewing both property and territory as relational, and mutually recursive, I introduce the practical work of property’s territory, the historical moment in which it was produced, the powerful metaphors that work through it, and the habits and everyday practices it induces. The territory of property, I suggest, has a specificity, a presence, and a consequentiality all of which demand our attention.
As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring... more As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human, and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking regarding territory
Property is a crucial means by which space is made, and remade. This is powerfully evident in set... more Property is a crucial means by which space is made, and remade. This is powerfully evident in settler societies, such as British Columbia, Canada. To understand the work that it does requires us to attend to the manner in which it is entangled in and constitutive of a multitude of relations (ethical, practical, historical, semantic and so on). Yet for property to function, some of these relationships must be bracketed. That which is designated as inside a boundary must be partly disentangled from that identified as outside. Property practice and theory helps organize these exclusions. Yet this is not disinterested: Property’s frames, therefore, can become political battle lines.
Drawing from a modern-day treaty process involving indigenous communities and the federal and provincial governments in British Columbia, Canada, I trace the ways in which the state has sought to disentangle property from its recently re-emergent colonial entanglements. One of the ways in which it has done this is to insist that First Nations hold their treaty settlement lands as a form of fee simple, this being bracketed as a clear and certain entitlement, replacing a messier ‘Aboriginal title’. First Nations negotiators, however, have pushed back, re-entangling fee simple in culture, politics and place. I explore the performative use of categorization on the part of the Crown in their attempt at re-framing fee simple as ‘simple’. Apart from documenting this understudied postcolonial moment, I also encourage geographers to recognize the important work that property does in making space. To do so, I theorize property as an effect, performed through multiple technical and categorical enactments.
Abstract: (forthcoming in Annual Review of Law and Social Science) Following the call to focus on... more Abstract: (forthcoming in Annual Review of Law and Social Science) Following the call to focus on law as a set of practices, I develop Callon’s concept of framing (which I refer to here as bracketing) in relation to law. Bracketing refers to the process of delimiting a sphere within which interactions take place more or less independently of a surrounding context. To do so is to temporarily rearrange the relations that constitute legal reality. A legal contract, for example, draws certain objects and relationships into sharper focus, ignoring or deliberately excluding others. I offer several examples of legal bracketing, some foundational, others highly routinized, and note several distinctive characteristics. I then use bracketing to think about legal categorization, law as effect (rather than essence), law’s success, and the heterogeneity found within a legal frame.
Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime – for example by squatting – they enact what can be called ‘contested property claims’. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Foreword: how property matters
NICHOLAS BLOMLEY
Introduction: disagreement as a window onto property
PATRICK J. L. COCKBURN, MAJA HOJER BRUUN, BJARKE SKÆRLUND RISAGER, AND MIKKEL THORUP
PART 1
Squatting and eviction
1 The right to the city and its limits: contested property claims, urban exceptionality, and the fight for relational space in Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games 2014
NEIL GRAY AND LIBBY PORTER
2 Possession through dispossession: in quest of property and social mobility in urban Brazil
MARIE KOLLING
3 The politics of legal technicalities: an inquiry into the demolition of a Roma EU-migrant settlement in Malmö, Sweden
MARIA PERSDOTTER
4 Urban emptiness, ghost owners and squatters’ challenges to private property
MIGUEL A. MARTÍNEZ
Intermezzos
5 Landed (Freeman’s Wood): an exploration of landownership through contemporary art
JOHN ANGUS AND STOREY G2
6 In the time of Trump: housing, whiteness, and abolition
MANISSA M. MAHARAWAL AND ERIN MCELROY
PART 2
Land rights and conflicting laws
7 The work of ownership: shaping contestation in Ontario’s aggregate extraction disputes
ESTAIR VAN WAGNER
8 Climate adaptation on the Australian east coast
TAYANAH O’DONNELL
9 Property as a technique of jurisdiction: traplines and tenure
SHIRI PASTERNAK
10 Decolonizing neoliberalism? First Nations reserves, private property rights, and the legislation of Indigenous dispossession in Canada
MICHAEL FABRIS (KREBS)
11 Contesting claims to gardens and land: gendered practice in post-war northern Uganda
JULAINA A. OBIKA, BEN ADOL OTTO, SULAYMAN MPISI BABIIHA, AND MICHAEL WHYTE
Afterword: prophecies on property’s probability: climate change and smart contracts in the Anthropocene
Law and geography doesn't exist. More accurately, the Library of Congress Dictionary of subject ... more Law and geography doesn't exist. More accurately, the Library of Congress Dictionary of subject headings has no entry for 'law and geography', though 'law and magic' and 'law and gospel' appear. 'Law, geographic' doesn't exist either, though 'Law, Germanic' and 'Law, Gothic' do. Not surprisingly, the response to the concept of a geography of law (or vice versa) has often been one of confusion: this is the 'what?' question in my title. In this paper, I first try and explain the 'what?' question, suggesting that it derives from some significant intellectual blockages. In particular, law and space, in various ways, have long been 'closed'; that is, understood as distinct from or only partially related to something called 'society'. However, the last few years has seen a concerted effort to bypass these blockages as scholars have begun to stake out a space for the study of law and geography. In exploring the insights of such research, I ask 'so what'? I suggest many productive insights can be gained, particularly if we move beyond the law/space binary.
Uploads
Papers by Nick Blomley
together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study
set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and
sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations
between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf
must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two
territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human,
and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making
of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for
humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking
regarding territory
associated with inner city gentrification in Vancouver, by an examination of the differing perspectives on real property deployed by the opposing constituencies. He identifies a marked division between dominant and community-based readings of property as an economic, political and legal category, associated with opposed visions of space, place and history. Conclusions are drawn relating to the significance of a geographically informed theorization of decentred legalities, and the complex politics of power, resistance and domination.
This introduction to the forthcoming book The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press) identifies and elaborates on three modes of legal geographic research. The first mode of legal geography includes disciplinary work in law or in geography that is modeled on the conventional image of import and export. The second is an interdisciplinary pursuit in which scholars in the eponymous fields draw on the work of each other and seek to contribute to the development of a common project. The third mode moves beyond legal geography to trans-disciplinary, or perhaps even post-disciplinary, modes of scholarship. Although these three modes exist concurrently, the general trajectory over time has been from disciplinary to interdisciplinary and, finally, to post-disciplinary orientations. This triadic classification helps organize the rich yet eclectic legal geography scholarship that has evolved over the last thirty years or so. While this introduction contains elements of each mode, it also urges interested scholars to move legal geography beyond the disciplinary boundaries into the horizons of a post-legal geography. Ironically, then, the ultimate success of legal geography will be in its ability to transcend the bi-disciplinary focus that has characterized so much of this scholarship up to this point.
In addition to the introduction, the book consists of ten chapters. In the first three, Keebet and the late Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Mariana Valverde, and Nicholas Blomley identify gaps and obstacles in existing approaches to legal geography scholarship and offer remedies. An important sub-theme in each of these chapters is the importance of being more mindful of the temporalities of social, spatial, and legal phenomena. Authored by Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar and Irus Braverman, the next two chapters ask how a critical comparative legal geography might not only draw upon but also contribute to a rejuvenated project of comparative law and the methodological stakes of legal geography scholarship. The remaining five chapters expand legal geography into new spaces and make new connections. Specifically, Michael Smith, Antonio Azuela and Rodrigo Meneses, Lisa Pruitt, Melinda Benson, and David Delaney develop novel interpretive resources with the aim of enhancing interdisciplinarity, applying these tools to particular kinds of spaces and places: war zones, the street, the workplace, American rurality, and procedural spaces.
together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study
set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and
sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations
between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf
must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two
territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human,
and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central
to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making
of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for
humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking
regarding territory
Drawing from a modern-day treaty process involving indigenous communities and the federal and provincial governments in British Columbia, Canada, I trace the ways in which the state has sought to disentangle property from its recently re-emergent colonial entanglements. One of the ways in which it has done this is to insist that First Nations hold their treaty settlement lands as a form of fee simple, this being bracketed as a clear and certain entitlement, replacing a messier ‘Aboriginal title’. First Nations negotiators, however, have pushed back, re-entangling fee simple in culture, politics and place. I explore the performative use of categorization on the part of the Crown in their attempt at re-framing fee simple as ‘simple’. Apart from documenting this understudied postcolonial moment, I also encourage geographers to recognize the important work that property does in making space. To do so, I theorize property as an effect, performed through multiple technical and categorical enactments.
together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study
set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and
sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations
between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf
must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two
territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human,
and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making
of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for
humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking
regarding territory
associated with inner city gentrification in Vancouver, by an examination of the differing perspectives on real property deployed by the opposing constituencies. He identifies a marked division between dominant and community-based readings of property as an economic, political and legal category, associated with opposed visions of space, place and history. Conclusions are drawn relating to the significance of a geographically informed theorization of decentred legalities, and the complex politics of power, resistance and domination.
This introduction to the forthcoming book The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press) identifies and elaborates on three modes of legal geographic research. The first mode of legal geography includes disciplinary work in law or in geography that is modeled on the conventional image of import and export. The second is an interdisciplinary pursuit in which scholars in the eponymous fields draw on the work of each other and seek to contribute to the development of a common project. The third mode moves beyond legal geography to trans-disciplinary, or perhaps even post-disciplinary, modes of scholarship. Although these three modes exist concurrently, the general trajectory over time has been from disciplinary to interdisciplinary and, finally, to post-disciplinary orientations. This triadic classification helps organize the rich yet eclectic legal geography scholarship that has evolved over the last thirty years or so. While this introduction contains elements of each mode, it also urges interested scholars to move legal geography beyond the disciplinary boundaries into the horizons of a post-legal geography. Ironically, then, the ultimate success of legal geography will be in its ability to transcend the bi-disciplinary focus that has characterized so much of this scholarship up to this point.
In addition to the introduction, the book consists of ten chapters. In the first three, Keebet and the late Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Mariana Valverde, and Nicholas Blomley identify gaps and obstacles in existing approaches to legal geography scholarship and offer remedies. An important sub-theme in each of these chapters is the importance of being more mindful of the temporalities of social, spatial, and legal phenomena. Authored by Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar and Irus Braverman, the next two chapters ask how a critical comparative legal geography might not only draw upon but also contribute to a rejuvenated project of comparative law and the methodological stakes of legal geography scholarship. The remaining five chapters expand legal geography into new spaces and make new connections. Specifically, Michael Smith, Antonio Azuela and Rodrigo Meneses, Lisa Pruitt, Melinda Benson, and David Delaney develop novel interpretive resources with the aim of enhancing interdisciplinarity, applying these tools to particular kinds of spaces and places: war zones, the street, the workplace, American rurality, and procedural spaces.
together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study
set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and
sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations
between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf
must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two
territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human,
and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central
to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making
of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for
humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking
regarding territory
Drawing from a modern-day treaty process involving indigenous communities and the federal and provincial governments in British Columbia, Canada, I trace the ways in which the state has sought to disentangle property from its recently re-emergent colonial entanglements. One of the ways in which it has done this is to insist that First Nations hold their treaty settlement lands as a form of fee simple, this being bracketed as a clear and certain entitlement, replacing a messier ‘Aboriginal title’. First Nations negotiators, however, have pushed back, re-entangling fee simple in culture, politics and place. I explore the performative use of categorization on the part of the Crown in their attempt at re-framing fee simple as ‘simple’. Apart from documenting this understudied postcolonial moment, I also encourage geographers to recognize the important work that property does in making space. To do so, I theorize property as an effect, performed through multiple technical and categorical enactments.
Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime – for example by squatting – they enact what can be called ‘contested property claims’. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Foreword: how property matters
NICHOLAS BLOMLEY
Introduction: disagreement as a window onto property
PATRICK J. L. COCKBURN, MAJA HOJER BRUUN, BJARKE SKÆRLUND RISAGER, AND MIKKEL THORUP
PART 1
Squatting and eviction
1 The right to the city and its limits: contested property claims, urban exceptionality, and the fight for relational space in Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games 2014
NEIL GRAY AND LIBBY PORTER
2 Possession through dispossession: in quest of property and social mobility in urban Brazil
MARIE KOLLING
3 The politics of legal technicalities: an inquiry into the demolition of a Roma EU-migrant settlement in Malmö, Sweden
MARIA PERSDOTTER
4 Urban emptiness, ghost owners and squatters’ challenges to private property
MIGUEL A. MARTÍNEZ
Intermezzos
5 Landed (Freeman’s Wood): an exploration of landownership through contemporary art
JOHN ANGUS AND STOREY G2
6 In the time of Trump: housing, whiteness, and abolition
MANISSA M. MAHARAWAL AND ERIN MCELROY
PART 2
Land rights and conflicting laws
7 The work of ownership: shaping contestation in Ontario’s aggregate extraction disputes
ESTAIR VAN WAGNER
8 Climate adaptation on the Australian east coast
TAYANAH O’DONNELL
9 Property as a technique of jurisdiction: traplines and tenure
SHIRI PASTERNAK
10 Decolonizing neoliberalism? First Nations reserves, private property rights, and the legislation of Indigenous dispossession in Canada
MICHAEL FABRIS (KREBS)
11 Contesting claims to gardens and land: gendered practice in post-war northern Uganda
JULAINA A. OBIKA, BEN ADOL OTTO, SULAYMAN MPISI BABIIHA, AND MICHAEL WHYTE
Afterword: prophecies on property’s probability: climate change and smart contracts in the Anthropocene
BILL MAURER
Index