Floris de Witte

“ Space conflicts can arise between socio-economic groups, between ideologies, between humans and more-than-humans; it can be articulated as a conflict between exploitation and preservation, or in terms of privileged access to resources such as water, territory or minerals. For some, this focus on conflict and justice is part and parcel of the project of legal geography – its inescapable normative commitment. ”

“ The term ‘law’, equally, has a wide connotation for most legal geographers, including statutes, case law, informal legal processes and conventions, but also political and institutional structures involved in lawmaking. In short, legal geographers are interested in how space co-creates law, and how law co-creates space.
The aims of legal geography are, essentially, to make visible how law affects what is around us, and vice versa. Legal scholars might intuitively be most attuned to the former: we know that law has the ability to shape the world in tangible and intangible ways. ”

“ Work of this sort is invaluable in shaping the discipline, in creating a communal language, fostering coherence and allowing for genuine interaction between studies and scholars.
Within the EU context, all this methodological work is perhaps even more valuable. Partially for obvious reasons: scholars will be used to their national traditions, methods and blind spots. There are no narratives, such as ‘integration through law’ or ‘constitutionalisation’, to connect EU legal geographers. How, then, can we ‘do’ EU legal geography? ”

“ Overall, it is safe to say that the discipline of EU legal geography does not yet exist. The absence of scholarship on EU legal geography signifies that – as a discipline – EU legal studies continues to struggle in shifting its register away from questions of politics and policy and towards the detail, stories and lives that make up Europe, an exercise in which international law scholarship, and scholarship on European human rights law, have been much more successful. ”

“ It is a geography waiting to be discovered, explored and reconfigured – an exercise that will not simply offer a more meaningful understanding of the nature and effect of EU law but also, more generally, of how the law of integration relates to the reality of integration. ”

“ EU legal geography can tell us something about what it means to live in the EU and what it means to live under EU law. It offers an analytical framework that can make sense of the realities of European integration in a way with which traditional accounts of EU law struggle.
A first, almost practical, reason why legal geography would be a natural fit for EU lawyers is that, for better or worse, the EU regulates most policy areas in which legal geographers are interested. Around 18 per cent of EU territory, for example, is designated a Natura 2000 site under the Habitats or Birds Directives. ”

“ As Zoe Pearson has argued with reference to international law, legal geography ‘provides us with an opportunity to see that spaces within the terrain of international law are not static, linear and ordered, but rather complex, fluid and uncertain, evolving continuously along with the interactions of the different actors present, and emphasising varying sites of legal and non-legal regulation’. ”

“ Legal geographers see how regulations on noise pollution affected the shape of the houses, how municipal decisions on public transport determine the socio-economic composition of the population, or how the proximity to a forest might lead to a de facto disapplication of municipal rules for waste disposal by the inhabitants. ‘Thinking spatially’ requires attention being paid to how space is given meaning through law, to tangible or intangible borders and to the scope of legal regulations. ”

“ Finally, as discussed, legal geography’s normative commitment is, itself, deeply revealing about the nature of a polity. In simple terms, different questions come into focus in different geographical contexts. The turn (in very general terms) towards questions of urban law in the USA, or indigenous and ecological questions in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, suggests specificity both in the sites of struggle as well as the normative commitments that legal geography engenders. What could this specificity mean in Europe? What makes Europe – in spatial, normative or geographical terms, specific? ”

“ There has been an increase in attention to space in EU law – in certain sites specifically. But bar a handful of contributions that will be discussed, these have been analysed and critiqued without the explicit spatial focus and reflexive awareness that characterises legal geography. Likewise, human and population geographers, but also ethnographers, anthropologists, migration scholars and criminologists, have increasingly focused on the effects ‘on the ground’ of certain EU policies, such as the Habitats Directive or the fisheries policy, or on the EU’s external borders ”

“ One wonders what questions and normative commitments a European project of legal geography would end up focusing on. Space, as such, allows for an analytical framework which brings together a range of elements that are often artificially separated as a consequence of more rigid disciplinary frameworks: social relations, legal constraints, material realities, more-than-human entities and economic effects. ”

“ Ultimately, the aim of the project of EU legal geography is to fill a gap that is becoming increasingly visible in EU legal studies, wherein it struggles to understand and articulate the resistance against the project of integration. ”

“ Legal geographers are a motley crew. They consist mainly of occasional visitors from ethnography, anthropology and human geography as well as critical geography, and include planning lawyers, political scientists, socio-legal scholars, critical legal scholars, environmental lawyers and policy scholars. ”

“ These different technologies of integration create room for the formation of novel configurations of space, time and authority in our daily lives: something as mundane as a shopping trip in a local supermarket in Stockholm might expose the shopper to Italian culinary heritage, Polish sausages and a French cassière. ”

“ This could come to the fore most explicitly in a third type of EU legal geography, focusing on concepts that articulate how the reflexive interaction between EU law and space both literally and metaphorically reshapes Europe. This could be by focusing on concepts whose register consist of spatial, temporal, conceptual and normative usages. An example could be to analyse concepts such as liveability, increasingly used to frame contemporary urban life. Concepts such as wilderness, localism, order, public, integration or tradition could be other interesting starting points. ”

“ The second example of work on the EU’s external borders that might be of interest deals with the ill-defined borderlands where national law, EU powers, Frontex and refugees collide; with a particular emphasis on specific sites such as the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, and on large-scale refugee sites such as Moria or the Białowieża Forest. Legal scholars have questioned the scope of EU norms in this context, the power of actors and the range of rights that should apply in these contexts. ”

“ EU law has harmonised public procurement, waste management, climate change responses and transport policy; it has rules on animals, agricultural policy, geographical indications, and regional and cohesion policy; free movement and competition law rules apply to ‘spatial questions’ as diverse as rental markets, tourism sectors, bookshops and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) ; and both the EU’s internal and external borders are regulated through EU law. ”

“ Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez’s work on ‘the Mall’ equally uses an explicit spatial perspective to analyse the way in which the legal regulation of particular places impacts on anti-discrimination norms and fundamental rights. [42] Just as is the case for scholars of urban law, legal geographers are drawn to cities: cities constitute places where a large number of legal demands collide – from consumer protection and housing to health and safety ”

“ Work such as this is absolutely necessary in EU law. It offers us ways of thinking about the nature, limits and capacity of EU law that is invaluable at a time where the role of law is being re-thought like never before in the process of integration. ”

“ A third type of space that EU lawyers are increasingly ‘finding’ relates to more-than-humans and the environment, even if this still remains primarily the domain of geographers and environmental lawyers. ”

“ Methodological Shifts and Law’s Embeddedness (Cambridge University Press 2022) . ↑ Braverman et al (eds) , The Expanding Spaces of Law (n 1) 2. ↑ A Iossa and M Persdotter, ‘Cross-Border Social Dumping as a “Game of Jurisdiction”: Towards a Legal Geography of Labour Relations in the EU Internal Market’ 59 (2021) Journal of Common Market Studies 1086. ↑ Well-known examples are A Favell, Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe (Wiley 2008) and N Fligstein, Euro-Clash: The EU, European Identity and the Future of Europe (Oxford University Press 2009) . ”