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Rights, Space and Categories: An Introduction to Legal Chorology
Abstract
This chapter addresses the thorny issue of how legal words and spatial experiences interplay. The topic is treated through the spectrum of human rights implementations and their semantic-spatial implications. This perspective allows for an immediate focus on the cognitive continuities that exist between categorical and spatial frames. When a subject (public or private) is entitled to enjoy a particular human right with respect to another, then they are entitled to a kind of practical substitution which, as such, implies a semantic and experiential shifting. The very possibility for shifting/displacement reveals cognitive continuities between word and space in the legal realm and experience. Moving from this view, the essay proposes a different approach to the relationships between legal words and space, assumed as a division of power by contemporary Legal Geography. The method used to define this perspective is precisely ‘Legal Chorology.’ The chapter will address its theoretical and practical implications in bridging and dynamically managing the diffraction between law and space. Legal reasoning is thus enhanced by using a semiotic perspective in the analysis of human spatial experience and cognition. The topics addressed range from a discussion of the intertwining of the human activity of categorization and the perception of space, to an assessment of the consequences that a chorological view can engender for classical legal issues such as inheritance law, urban law, contract law, and so on.
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Legal geography is experiencing a 'practice turn'. Understanding the material, spatial and embodied characteristics of law is illuminating hitherto obscured experiences of justice, injustice, and political practice. It is contributions from scholars at the forefront of these concerns, from geography and cognate disciplines, that comprise the papers in the Practicing Legal Geography special section. Across seven papers we are seeking to explore the ways in which a focus on practice can deepen our understanding of the methods and praxis of legal geography. Following an outline of its conceptual underpinnings and origins of the research we give a short account of each of the papers and point to areas of future research for which they provide provocation. Practice emerges as much more than empirical detail, it is a perspective through which we can trace the operation of power and struggle in the making of law.
Following a number of controversial judgments, the British government has been pushing for some time for a limitation of the supervisory powers of the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg. On a British proposal, the member states of the Council of Europe agreed in 2012 to include a reference to the subsidiarity principle into the Preamble of the European Convention on Human Rights. This paper describes these developments and explores the possible role of subsidiarity considerations in the context of international human rights protection.
Legal systems can be metaphorically taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures. The ancient world has given us at least three literary loci that display the self-disruptive significance of this kind of metaphor if assumed as a practical guideline in the attempt to steer human experience. The first such loci can be traced in biblical Eden; the second one in the Phaeacian garden described in Homer’s Odyssey; the third in the stories of the first and second mythical Athens included in Plato’s Timaeus and Republic. In all these tales, human beings ineluctably end up straying across the semantic-spatial borders which certain categories and rules have given them to encompass their experience. All these literary loci offer both a semio-cognitive and a constitutional lesson for lawyers and sovereigns. My intention is to exploit these lessons to show that the most relevant limit of legal systems, if taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures, consists precisely in their inability to constitutively limit themselves and their semiotic borders. This inaptitude is due, in my view, to the semiotic ‘exceedance’ of the phrastic, or descriptive parts of legal rules even more than the semantic vagueness of the values underlying their legitimacy. Any attempt to define the semantic and spatial boundaries of human experience by means of verbal enunciations implies the use of categorical schemes to define the legitimate and/or forbidden behaviors. But categorical schemes, in turn, comprise boundaries that draw protean verges between the inside and the outside of each category. The categorical ‘inside’ compellingly tends to exceed its borders so as to protrude out toward what is outside the category. In turn, the ‘outside’ shows, more often than not, continuities with the axiological/teleological patterns underpinning the semantic boundaries of legal rules. Any attempt to limit the competence/extension of law, if taken in its semantic/spatial significance, would seem to unveil what law could or should be, but is not. Relying on the above literary loci, I will try to demonstrate that this apparently contradictory implication is inherent in the dialectic between equality/universality and difference/plurality that makes up categorization itself, and thereby the semiotic prerequisites to considering any legal rule.
We argue that legal geography’s ability to produce holistic knowledge about law and legal relations is hampered by the qualified dominance in the field of what we refer to as a contingency orientation. This phrase refers to both the belief that law, legal relations, and legal outcomes are more open and contingent than they appear to be, and to an empirical interest in bringing to light moments when law, legal relations, and legal outcomes appear to depart from dominant representations of these as closed, determinate, aspatial, and wholly formal. Because holistic accounts of the social world require attention to both agency and structure, both contingency and determination, we call for a stream of scholarship within legal geography the purpose of which is to give more explicit and concerted attention to structure and determination than there has heretofore been in the field, and to produce research-based theoretical knowledge that can thus improve the holism of our collective understanding of the law.
The essay addresses the issue concerning intercultural translation and its relationship with human rights. This matter is analyzed by taking human rights as interfaces of metaphorical intercultural “transduction” rather than as parameters to assess the lawfulness of people’s behaviors or their legal systems of belonging. Such an approach is in tune with the intercultural law methodology. It implies a threefold reading of Otherness, which comprises the accomplishment of the following three
passages:
1) Crossing narratives; 2) Intercultural cross-contextualizations; 3) Translations/Transactions.
The completion of these tasks is designed to allow legal interpreters to go beyond the morphological appearance of the conduct of Others. The necessity of acquiring such an ability to look beyond appearances is coextensive with the need for self-distancing from one’s own cultural habits and patterns of judgment when Otherness is to be understood and then legally qualified. For this purpose, the intercultural approach includes, as one of its main requirements, learning to see morphological appearances as hermeneutical and phenomenological results rather than data.
Each of these results is an outcome of a process; and every process unfolds by drawing a story. The narrative components of such experiential plots can be observed and considered as connotative elements of the above result, namely the socio-cultural datum. Subjects and objects are both dialectical ingredients and actors of the narrative traces that give rise to the semantic structure and morphological appearance of the datum. Understanding and translating Otherness requires, therefore, an effort to dis-compose the connotative landscapes underlying forms and appearances of phenomena (conduct, behaviors, words), so as to see the formation processes of data in their constitutive elements. Forms and their spatial fashion can be considered, then, through the lens of a temporal assessment capable of sequencing and contextualizing the constitutive elements of morphological appearances. This sort of microscopic gaze cast towards and through the connotative prehistory of facts involving cultural Otherness can open the way to a creative intercultural translation. Human rights can serve, at that point, as axiological and semantic interfaces able to reveal continuities between the connotative landscapes upon which cultural differences rely. The artistic avant-garde of the early XX century and, specifically, Paul Klee’s “figuration theory,” paved the way to this “art” of connotative dis-composition and creative re-composition. For this very reason, the essay undertakes, in its central section, a sort of journey through the imaginative and theoretical territories of Klee’s “figurational” thought. The essay contends that jurists and politicians may have much tolearn from the cognitive legacy of this great artist. This is because the intercultural conflicts that contemporary global society faces have primarily to do with—this is the central point—a form of cognitive un-readiness prior to rather than after conflicts of values.
Following an analysis of Klee’s dis-compositional methodology, the essay proceeds with the
application of an intercultural approach to practical issues, and specifically to the troubles of coexistence between cultural differences in urban micro-spaces. Lived spaces are, however, social spaces: as such they are targets of axiological, teleological and normative projections. Understanding the spaces of coexistence requires, therefore, an analysis of its connections with categorical and normative “scansions” that give “rhythm” to the uses of that space and, consequentially, mold the meaning of it. The reciprocal implications between subjectivity, spatiality and categorization can be effectively understood through the spectrum of a typical legal feature of housing coexistence: nuisance law. The outcome of such an analysis leads to the recognition of human rights and their intercultural use as interfaces/transducers suitable for conveying translation and interpenetration between physical and cultural, close and remote, spaces of experience. Such translational and transactional practices allow for the emersion of a space for multicultural coexistence endowed with the effectiveness inherent to the normativity of law. It appears as a chorological dimension, within which sign and matter, subject and space, categories and geography/topography, together, rearticulate their connotations along a continuum of sense and experience that finds in the condominium and its process of apart-ment (separation/seclusion) both a metaphor and a laboratory for the possibilities of
global coexistence.
Mirrors of Justice is a groundbreaking study of the meanings of and possibilities for justice in the contemporary world. The book brings together a group of prominent and emerging scholars to reconsider the relationship of justice, international law, culture, power, and history through case studies of a wide range of justice processes. The book’s eighteen authors examine the ambiguities of justice in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Melanesia through critical empirical and historical chapters. The introduction makes an important contribution toour understanding of the multiplicity of justice in the twenty-first century by providing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes the book’s chapters with leading-edge literatures on human rights, legal pluralism, and international law.
There can be no justice that is not spatial. Against a recent tendency to despatialise law, matter, bodies and even space itself, this book insists on spatialising them, arguing that there can be neither law nor justice that are not articulated through and in space. Spatial Justice presents a new theory and a radical application of the material connection between space - in the geographical as well as sociological and philosophical sense - and the law - in the broadest sense that includes written and oral law, but also embodied social and political norms. More specifically, it argues that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies - human, natural, non-organic, technological - to occupy a certain space at a certain time. Seen in this way, spatial justice is the most radical offspring of the spatial turn, since, as this book demonstrates, spatial justice can be found in the core of most contemporary legal and political issues - issues such as geopolitical conflicts, environmental issues, animality, colonisation, droning, the cyberspace and so on. In order to ague this, the book employs the lawscape, as the tautology between law and space, and the concept of atmosphere in its geological, political, aesthetic, legal and biological dimension. Written by a leading theorist in the area, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere forges a new interdisciplinary understanding of space and law, while offering a fresh approach to current geopolitical, spatiolegal and ecological issues.
Because there is little literature about how law and space may be related, this has led to the notion that these two concepts should be separate from each other. However, there have been some notions that demonstrate how law is concerned with space and geography. Also, this chapter realises that both respects have embraced the notion of hybridity since law may be integrated with history, literature, economics, and other such aspects while geography has already been able to generate certain subdisciplinary fields. This chapter attempts to explain how law and geography may together create a novel discipline since such may be derived from various intellectual blockages such as how law and space are distinguished from what we commonly refer to as 'society'. As the chapter attempts to establish a validity for this field, the text also looks into certain insights that can be attained from thought that may also go beyond the law/space binary.
Legal geography investigates the co-constitutive relationship of people, place and law. This essay provides an overview of how the law and geography cross-disciplinary project emerged from a context of mutual curiosity and explores how legal practice, in all its discretionary and rule-bound variety, co-produces places through an attentiveness to, and sometimes an apparent dismissal of, spatiality. The essay notes the formative importance of studies on power and inequality within urban governance in this predominantly critical field. However, it also considers how the cross-discipline is increasingly embracing legal geographic scholarship from within cultural, material and post-human geographies. Adopting the metaphor of the ‘spatial detective’, the essay situates legal geography as a way of examining law's materialisation within space, considering the field's methods, core concepts and the potential directions in which they may evolve.
On oceanographic research vessels, scientists from different disciplines must work together to obtain samples from the sea beneath their ship. Such juxtaposition of not just theory, but actual laboratory practice, creates unique possibilities for synergy, as members of one discipline make use of the tools of another. Using videotapes of technicians deploying a probe in the mouth of the Amazon, this paper investigates how multiple kinds of space - including the sea under the ship, graphic representations, the work space of the lab, and embodied participation frameworks for the organization of tool-mediated human interaction - are constituted through a range of temporally unfolding, work-relevant, situated practices. Particular attention is paid to how three parties work together to precisely position the probe at a spot where a geochemist wants to take samples. Because each actor uses alternative tools to organize his or her perception in ways appropriate to complementary tasks required for the successful accomplishment of the sampling run, each sees the place they are looking at together in a very different way.
The shaping of geography as a discipline has been the result of a combination of productive and successful communication and missed opportunities, of presence and absence, of fluid travels of ideas and projects, but also of closures, impediments, good lessons that got lost. This paper suggests that using a counterfactual approach to draw attention to specific geographies that remained unfulfilled and poorly known helps to think beyond linear genealogies. By discussing a particular book called Le Metafore della Terra by Giuseppe Dematteis, published in Italian in 1985 but largely unknown in English-language geography, we reflect on what happened when it was published – and also specifically what did not happen and, cautiously, what might have happened. In his book, Dematteis took issue with geography and geographers’ past and contemporary mistakes, suggesting that the depoliticization of geographical knowledge had served merely powerful interests, rendering the imagining of alternative worlds impossible. He picked apart sacred tenets of the geographical tradition: escapist fantasies of exploration and conquest, the poorly problematized use of scale, the faith in the power of cartographic reason, the metaphysics of organicism, and the magical belief in the power of the market. Here, by extending the idea of counterfactual histories to look inwards to the discipline of geography itself, we choose to engage with what might have happened if this particular critical approach to geography had become better known, exploring why this radical project for the discipline was cast aside, including by the author himself. In so doing, we consider how scholars are located in so-called ‘peripheral’ places of production of geographical knowledge, discussing how this helps to understand the circulation and non-circulation of certain ideas. We use these alternatively rewritten geographies to show how dominant linear narratives of the emerging of critical thinking in the 1980s tell us an incomplete story, suggesting instead a tangled, multiple history of the discipline. We are interested in how scientific knowledge is communicated and received, how this exposes both the multi-sited nature of knowledge production and circulation, and cultural and national differences in the reception of science, and what this says about the possibility of critical thinking and progressive ideas having real impact.
In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for theorizing the role of lawyers in legal geography research to foster better understandings of the processes and the people co-constituting space and law. We argue that the practice of law is missing from existing legal geography scholarship. Adding insights from legal studies and geography, we propose an agenda for research that places lawyers at the center of analyses of legal (and political) claims-making, particularly place-claims in land-use disputes. We illustrate our call with an example from a study of conflict over a manufactured housing park in Georgia.
Many scholars of language have accepted a view of grammar as a clearly delineated and internally coherent structure which is best understood as a self-contained system. The contributors to this volume propose a very different way of approaching and understanding grammar, taking it as part of a broader range of systems which underlie the organisation of social life and emphasising its role in the use of language in everyday interaction and cognition. Taking as their starting-point the position that the very integrity of grammar is bound up with its place in the larger schemes of the organisation of human conduct, particularly with social interaction, their essays explore a rich variety of linkages between interaction and grammar.
Color categories sit at the intersection of 2 central topics in the study of human cognition: (a) the analysis of vision, and (b) the study of semantic categories, or more generally processes of classification. Using as data videotape of archaeologists filling out a coding sheet that requires them to systematically describe the color of the dirt they have excavated, this article describes the practices required to competently classify color within the work life of their profession. The task of color classification is embedded within a situated activity system, which includes not only several different ways of identifying the same color (each designed for alternative uses), but also cognitive artifacts, such as a Munsell color chart and specific embodied practices. The chart creates a historically constituted architecture for perception, a heterotopia that juxtaposes in a single visual field 2 very different kinds of space. As multiple parties fill out the coding sheet together, the full resources of the organization of talk-in-interaction are brought to bear on the contingent tasks they are charged with accomplishing. This investigation of a situated activity system encompassing not only semantic categories, but also physical tools and embodied practices, contrasts with most previous research on color categories, which has focused almost exclusively on mental phenomena, and not on how people perform color classification to pursue a relevant course of action in the consequential settings that make up their lifeworld.
While spatial justice could be the most radical offspring of law’s recent spatial turn, it remains instead a geographically informed version of social justice. The majority of the existing literature on the subject has made some politically facile assumptions about space, justice and law, thereby subsuming the potentially radical into the banal. In this article, I suggest that the concept of spatial justice is the most promising platform on which to redefine, not only the connection between law and geography but more importantly, the conceptual foundations of both law and space.More concretely, the article attempts two things: first, a radical understanding of legal spatiality. Space is not just another parameter for law, a background against which law takes place, or a process that the law needs to take into consideration. Space is intertwined with normative production in ways that law often fails to acknowledge, and part of this article is a re-articulation of the connection. And, second, to suggest a conception of spatial justice that derives from a spatial law. Such a conception cannot rely on given concepts of distributive or social justice. Instead, the concept of spatial justice put forth here is informed by poststructural, feminist, postecological and other radical understandings of emplacement and justice, as well as arguably the most spatial of philosophical discourses, that of Deleuze-Guattari and the prescribed possibilities of space as manifold.
This is a critical reading of the current literature on law and geography. The article argues that the literature is characterized by an undertheorization of the concept of space. Instead, the focus is either on the specific geography of law in the form of jurisdiction, or as a simple terminological innovation. Instead, the article suggests that law's spatial turn ought to consider space as a singular parameter to the hitherto legal preoccupation with time, history and waiting. This forces law into dealing with a new, peculiarly spatial kind of uncertainty in terms of simultaneity, disorientation, materiality and exclusionary corporeal emplacement. The main area in which this undertheorization forcefully manifests itself is that of spatial justice. Despite its critical potential, the concept has been reduced by the majority of the relevant literature into another version of social, distributive or regional justice. On the contrary, if the peculiar characteristics of space are to be taken into account, a concept of justice will have to be rethought on a much more fundamental level than that.
Seeing is investigated as a socially situated, historically constituted body of practices through which the objects of knowledge that animate the discourse of a profession are constructed and shaped. Analysis of videotapes of archaeologists making maps and lawyers animating events visible on the Rodney King videotape focuses on practices that are articulated in a work-relevant way within sequences of human interaction, including coding schemes, highlighting, and graphic representations. Through the structure of talk in interaction, members of a profession hold each other accountable for, and contest the proper constitution and perception of, the objects that define their professional competence.
How do transnational ideas such as human rights approaches to violence against women become meaningful in local social settings? How do they move across the gap between a cosmopolitan awareness of human rights and local sociocultural understandings of gender and family? Intermediaries such as community leaders, nongovernmental organization participants, and social movement activists play a critical role in translating ideas from the global arena down and from local arenas up. These are people who understand both the worlds of transnational human rights and local cultural practices and who can look both ways. They are powerful in that they serve as knowledge brokers between culturally distinct social worlds, but they are also vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by states and communities. In this article, I theorize the process of translation and argue that anthropological analysis of translators helps to explain how human rights ideas and interventions circulate around the world and transform social life.
Nothing: A Very Short Introduction explores the science and history of the elusive Void: from Aristotle, who insisted that the vacuum was impossible, via the theories of Newton and Einstein, to the very latest discoveries and why they can tell us extraordinary things about the cosmos. This VSI tells the story of how scientists have explored the Void and the discoveries that they have made there. It describes how they discovered that the vacuum is filled with fields and how it may contain hidden dimensions of which we were previously unaware. These new discoveries may provide answers to some of cosmology's most fundamental questions.
Does temporal language depend on spatial language? This widespread view is intuitively appealing since spatial and temporal expressions are often similar or identical. Also, metaphors consistently express temporal phenomena in terms of spatial language, pointing to a close semantic and conceptual relationship. But what about the application of the two kinds of linguistic expressions in natural discourse? The book draws together findings on terms that describe the relation of objects or events to each other (such as in front / behind, before / after, etc.), highlighting the relationship between cognition and language usage. Using the method of cognitively motivated discourse analysis, novel empirical results are presented to complement earlier findings. The detailed investigation of a selected range of terms that appear to be parallel in space and time highlights both similarities and fundamental differences in their application. As a result, a new picture emerges: The concepts of space and time are represented in language usage in various systematic ways, reflecting how we understand the world - and at the same time reflecting how our concepts of space and time differ fundamentally. The volume contributes to a debate that has been of interest for cognitive linguists for several decades, concerning the understanding of transfer processes between two conceptually intertwined domains. The specific contribution of this work consists of addressing the novel question of how such processes come into play in the actual application of relevant expressions in natural discourse. By adopting established approaches from Discourse Analysis for issues that are deeply rooted in interdisciplinary research in Cognitive Science, insights are drawn together from two hitherto largely unrelated fields of research to approach the topic from an original perspective, leading to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the domains of space and time and their expression in language. © 2007 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
Polycentricity in the European Union - edited by Josephine van Zeben April 2019
“Sarat and Kearns … have edited a truly marvelous work on the impact of the law on daily life and vice versa…. the essays are all exemplary, thought- provoking works worthy of a long, contemplative read by scholars, lawyers, and judges alike.” --Choice “The subject of law in everyday life is timely in theory and in practice. The essays collected here are stimulating for the very different ways in which they reconfigure the meanings of 'the law' as cultural practice, and 'the everyday' as a cultural domain in which the state expresses a range of interests and engagements. Readers looking for an introduction to this topic will come away from the book with a clear sense of the varied voices and modes of inquiry now involved in sociolegal studies, and what distinguishes them. More experienced readers will appreciate the book's meticulous reconsideration of the instrumentalities, agencies, and constructedness of law." --Carol Greenhouse, Indiana University.
In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices. Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies. In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity.
While there may be several methodological and theoretical perspectives that may be encountered in such an endeavour as finding a connection between law and georgraphy, one of the dominant paradigms involves how 'law' refers to practices that focus on meaning, interpretation, representation, and other such conceptualizations. Another paradigm involves how geography refers to places, landscapes, and other visible bodies. Looking into how law may be connected with geography takes advantage of how law is involved in all aspects of social life and of the fact that geography is in fact everywhere. While geography is perceived to be concerned with the sameness and differentiations which become evident on the ground, law, on the other hand, is mostly involved with organizing schemes of both difference and similarity and heterogeneity and homogeneity. Studying the relationship and intersections between the fields of geography and law therefore encompasses a rich field of combinations and representations of both the extra-planetary and the micro-corporeal.
The rights and duties attributed to private law are often not expressed explicitly in spatial terms. While some aspects like property rights may in fact be articulated in spatial terms, such aspects are often undermined by the abstract form of law. This means that the spatial relations have to be addressed by looking into law's spatial dimension. This chapter attempts not to look 'behind' the law in search for spatial aspects but rather investigate the conceptual frameworks, the principles, and the rules associated to private law that may reveal possible spatial dimensions. Since the duties and rights that are identified in this chapter are defined in a way that is entirely aspatial, the chapter seeks to understand how such laws are altogether abstracted from space. Spatial location, as such, is of no relevance for such an application.
What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines. In this extraordinary book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and lays the foundations for a completely new discipline: the anthropological archaeology of the line. Ingold's argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrinths and Roman roads, Chinese calligraphy and the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity and the present. Setting out from a puzzle about the relation between speech and song, Ingold considers how two kinds of line - threads and traces - can turn into one another as surfaces form or dissolve. He reveals how our perception of lines has changed over time, with modernity converting to point-to-point connectors before becoming straight, only to be ruptured and fragmented by the postmodern world. Drawing on a multitude of disciplines including archaeology, classical studies, art history, linguistics, psychology, musicology, philosophy and many others, and including more than seventy illustrations, this book takes us on an exhilarating intellectual journey that will change the way we look at the world and how we go about in it.
Short and accessible, this book interweaves a discussion of the geography of property in one global city, Vancouver, with a more general analysis of property, politics, and the city.
While certain aspects of Henri Lefebvre's writings have been examined extensively within the disciplines of geography, social theory, urban planning and cultural studies, there has been no comprehensive consideration of his work within legal studies. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City provides the first serious analysis of the relevance and importance of this significant thinker for the study of law and state power. Introducing Lefebvre to a legal audience, this book identifies the central themes that run through his work, including his unorthodox, humanist approach to Marxist theory, his sociological and methodological contributions to the study of everyday life and his theory of the production of space. These elements of Lefebvre's thought are explored through detailed investigations of the relationships between law, legal form and processes of abstraction; the spatial dimensions of neoliberal configurations of state power; the political and aesthetic aspects of the administrative ordering of everyday life; and the 'right to the city' as the basis for asserting new forms of spatial citizenship. Chris Butler argues that Lefebvre's theoretical categories suggest a way for critical legal scholars to conceptualise law and state power as continually shaped by political struggles over the inhabitance of space. This book is a vital resource for students and researchers in law, sociology, geography and politics, and all readers interested in the application of Lefebvre's social theory to specific legal and political contexts.
Critical legal geography is practised by an increasing number of scholars in various disciplines, but it has not had the benefit of an overarching theoretical framework that might overcome its currently rather ad hoc character. The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making remedies this situation. Presenting a balanced convergence of contemporary socio-legal and critical geographic scholarship, David Delaney offers a ground-breaking contribution to the fast growing field of legal geography. Drawing on strands of critical social studies that inform both of these areas, this book has three primary components. First, it introduces a framework of interpretation and analysis centred on the productive neologisms 'nomosphere' and 'nomoscapes'. Nomosphere refers to the cultural-material environs that are constituted by the reciprocal materialization of 'the legal' and the legal signification of the 'socio-spatial'. Nomoscapes are the spatio-legal expression and the socio-material realization of ideologies, values, pervasive power orders and social projects. They are extensive ensembles of legal spaces within and through which lives are lived and, here, these neologisms are related to the more familiar notions of governmentality and performativity. Second, these neologisms are explored and applied through a series of illustrations and extensive case studies. Demonstrating their utility for scholars and students in relevant disciplines, these 'empirical' studies concern: the public and the private; property and land tenure; governance; the domestic and the international; and legal-spatial confinements and containments. Third, these studies contribute to an ongoing theorization of the experiential, situated pragmatics of 'world-making'. The role of nomospheric projects and counter-projects, techniques and operations is therefore emphasized. Much of what is experientially significant about how the world is as it is and what it's like to be in the world directly implicates the dynamic interplay of space, law, meaning and power. The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making provides the interpretive resources necessary for discerning and understanding the practices and projects involved in this interplay.
Although it has been a recognized tendency in human geography and socio-legal studies for nearly 20 years, the project of legal geography has expanded significantly in the last five years in terms of participants, topics of investigation, and theoretical elaboration. This initial report on legal geography emphasizes recent work by geographers, especially younger scholars, and is addressed to the wider community of human geographers. It seeks to convey a sense of the expanded scope of research over the last few years through a discussion of key themes of constitutivity, complexity, and contingency. It suggests that, in many cases, closer critical scrutiny of the involvement of distinctively legal phenomena in the events of particular interest to human geographers can open up productive lines of inquiry that are foreclosed by the conventional neglect of the legal in human geography.
This book provides an essential insight into the practices and ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the spaces in which we live.
List of Illustrations. Acknowledgements. Introduction/Itinerary/Overture. Part I: Discovering Thirdspace: . 1. The Extraordinary Voyages of Henri Lefebvre. 2. The Trialectics of Spatiality. 3. Exploring the Spaces that Difference Makes: Notes on the Margins. 4. Increasing the Openness of Thirdspace. 5. Heterotopologies: Foucault and the Geohistory of Otherness. 6. Re--Presenting the Spatial Critique of Historicism. Part II: Inside and Outside Los Angeles: . 7. Remembrances: A Heterotopology of the Citadel--LA. 8. Inside Exopolis: Everyday Life in the Postmodern World. 9. The Stimulus of a Little Confusion: A Contemporary Comparison of Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Select Bibliography. Name Index. Subject Index.
Introduction. 1. The Scandal of Ambivalence. 2. Social Construction of Ambivalence. 3. Self--Construction of Ambivalence. 4. A Case Study in the Sociology of Assimilation (I):. Trapped in Ambivalence. 5. A Case Study in the Sociology of Assimilation (II):. Revenge of Ambivalence. 6. Privatization of Ambivalence. 7. Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence.
This article argues that the principle of subsidiarity should be recognized as a structural principle of international human rights law primarily because of the way that it mediates between the universalizing aspirations of human rights and the fact of the diversity of human communities in the world. The idea of subsidiarity is deeply consonant with the substantive vision of human dignity and the universal common good that is expressed through human rights norms. Yet, at the same time it promotes respect for pluralism by emphasizing the freedom of more local communities to realize their own ends for themselves. Looking at the place of subsidiarity in international law generally, the article argues that subsidiarity is a more accurate and powerful way of understanding the relationship of human rights to international law and to the roles of states in the global community. Using the constitutional structure of the European Union as a starting point, the article presents subsidiarity as a conceptual alternative to classic notions of state sovereigny, which relativizes but does not eliminate the roles of nation states. The analysis shows that in many ways, subsidiarity is already immanent in the existing structures and doctrines of international human rights law, and provides a better explanation for a number of otherwise problematic features of international human rights law, such as the "margin of appreciation" and reservations to universal human rights treaties. Finally, the article defends the idea and use of the principle of subsidiarity against critiques that resist the legal pluralism that subsidiarity fosters and protects. It argues that philosophical, legal and political objections to pluralism in international human rights law are misdirected, and that an international legal system structured in accordance with subsidiarity can best combine the values of universality and diversity that respect for human rights requires.
In this article, I draw on ethnography in the particular zone of engagement between anthropologists, on the one hand, and human rights lawyers who are skeptical of the human rights regime, on the other hand. I argue that many problems anthropologists encounter with the appropriation and marginalization of anthropology's analytical tools can be understood in terms of the legal character of human rights. In particular, discursive engagement between anthropology and human rights is animated by the pervasive instrumentalism of legal knowledge. I contend that both anthropologists who seek to describe the culture of human rights and critical lawyers who critically engage the human rights regime share a common problem - that of the iron cage of legal instrumentalism. I conclude that an ethnographic method reconfigured as a matter of what I term circling back - as opposed to cultural description - offers a respite from the hegemony of legal instrumentalism.
Through a case study based in Bristol, this article explores how the ‘law of place’ has transformed multiple heterogeneous city centre spaces into a single homogeneous and commodified privately owned retail site. Drawing on de Certeau, Lefebvre, and humanistic geographers including Tuan, the article explores how law facilitates spatial and temporal enclosure through conventional understandings of private property, relying on techniques of masterplanning, compulsory purchase, and stopping up highways. It suggests that the law of place draws on binary spatial and conceptual distinctions to apparently separate places from spaces, applying different legal rules either side of an often invisible boundary line. The article questions this legally facilitated spatial and conceptual enclosure, particularly as it restricts spatial practices within the public realm. It concludes by rejecting an urban ‘right to roam’ as insufficiently transformative, calling for a broader interpretation of Lefebvre's ‘right to the city’ instead.
This book describes the many ways that the mind and body are closely interrelated, and how human thought and language are fundamentally linked to bodily action. The embodied nature of mind is explored through many topics, such as perception, thinking, language use, development, emotions, and consciousness. People's embodied experiences are critical to the ways they think and speak and, most generally, understand themselves, other people, and the world around them. This work provides a strong defense of the idea that embodied action is critical to the study of human cognition.