Interstices: new work on legal spaces

What does it mean to talk about ‘legal spaces’; about law spatially and space legally? What is the research agenda that this volume announces, whose relevance it demonstrates, and whose methodology it showcases? The study of space in law insists first and foremost on the material world as essentially constitutive of law. In both the analytic and the continental traditions of jurisprudence, law has too often been treated as a series of abstract propositions, a structure of norms in search of application. Admittedly, law understands itself as spatially delimited — the notion of a territory is a central if relatively modern aspect of law’s claim to authority (see Blomley 1994, McVeigh 2005) — but at the same time it is assumed that it exerts the same and absolute force throughout its jurisdiction. Instead, legal spaces draws on the tradition of legal pluralism (Griffiths 1986, Falk Moore 1978, Merry 1988, 2000, Kleinhans & Macdonald 1997, Mellisaris 2004) in arguing that how and what law means is influenced by where it means. Yet unlike much of the work of this tradition, legal spaces explores the diversity of legal norms and the disparateness of legal effects not just in terms of the social elements that constantly work to generate and differentiate it, but the physical elements too, and of course the social and the physical are likewise mutually implicated. The law both structures our understanding of certain spaces, while at the same time those spaces themselves radically transform the experience, application, and effect of the law. Law’s definition of a