What can legal geography do for the study of regions?

Kanellopoulou, Evgenia Jenny (2024) What can legal geography do for the study of regions? Regional Studies Association Blog.

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Abstract

Legal geography as a subdiscipline of human geography has been progressively gaining momentum across geographic and legal fora. Legal geography examines the co-constitutivity of law, power, and place, and has been employed to explore issues of spatial justice across contexts and scales, from the international, where national borders, armed conflict, human rights, and climate change, and cultural heritage are discussed, to the national, regional, and, then the micro level, where geography is used as a way of appreciating the spatial dimensions of formal and informal justice (e.g., courtroom geographies and geographies of home). However, it has yet to gain full scale recognition in a regional studies context, even though it has an important role to play, when it comes to appreciating the gap between laws and policies on the one hand and the law’s place-felt impact on the other.