Law, space, and the geographies of power

TLDR

The book explores how law and geography are interdependent, arguing that space and legal categories shape power and social life across property, constitutional interpretation, contracts, crime, and intergovernmental law. The authors aim to build a critical legal geography that documents Blomley's theory and challenges conventional views by illustrating the analysis through empirical case studies in Britain, the United States, and Canada. The study employs a wide-ranging synthesis of legal theory and empirical case studies—examining U.S. occupational safety, the 1984–85 British miners' strike, Canadian Charter mobility, and common law history—to unpack legal geographies.

Abstract

This illuminating new volume offers a ground-breaking exploration into the intriguing and politically significant relationship between law and geography. Nicholas K. Blomley asserts that space and law, rather than being fixed, objective categories, have a crucial bearing on the deployment of power and the structuring of social life. Arguing that the geographies of law can be powerful--even oppressive--in combination with their implied claims concerning social life, Blomley clearly demonstrates how, over the last two centuries, legal judgment has entailed the adjudication of issues of power and space. The volume synthesizes ideas from the fields of law and to construct a critical legal geography that both documents Blomley's theory and challenges the orthodox treatment of law, space, and power. With unusual insight into the ideology and intricacy of legal reasoning, the book shows how--contrary to appearance-- representations (or geographies) of the spaces of political, social, and economic life are deeply embedded within legal thought and practice. These representations, he argues, touch on all aspects of legal life including property, constitutional interpretation, contractual relations, crime, and intergovernmental law. To illustrate the book's analysis, empirical chapters offer case studies in Britain, the United States, and Canada, to reveal how legal geographies reflect complex and often contesting visions of social life under law. In a wide ranging exploration, Blomley unpacks struggles over U.S. occupational safety, the British miners' strike of 1984 - 1985, mobility and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and common law legal history.