Law & Space (un)Journal Launches This Week
I am thrilled to unveil a project that I've been working on over the summer with colleagues called the Law & Space (un)Journal. Law & Space is a new online hub for legal geography scholarship that will showcase the latest research and ongoing projects in the field, as well as provide commentary and context for current issues in the news, information about relevant conferences, and reviews of the latest books and academic articles.
TLDR: If you go to lawandspace.com, you're going to get a really interesting perspective on law from a geographical perspective. Our first article is by Alida Cantor on the regimes of legal access to water during one of the most serious droughts in our country’s history. Also follow our Twitter handle @lawandspace. Special thanks to Riwaj Chalise for working with me on the backend development.
For those of you who are not legal geographers, which is probably all of you, let me take a moment to explain what this is all about.
Legal geography, as Luke Bennett and Antonia Layard described it, is the investigation of the profound “relationship of people, place and law”. I first came across the writings of legal geographers like David Delaney and Nick Blomley when I was studying the local effects of immigration enforcement in graduate school. As a geographer, I was (and still am) very interested in understand how policies like 287(g) and Secure Communities were implemented differently by various law enforcement jurisdictions and how these policies shaped the local social and economic landscape.
The problem, as I saw it then, was that many social scientists treat the law as a black box, gesturing vaguely towards its causes and effects without interrogating its inner workings. At the same time, lawyers and judges steeped in the law seemed to either downplay or ignore the historical geography and spatial concepts that produced the law in the first place and that contribute to its socially uneven effects. Legal geography, therefore, was a powerful lens for helping me to think about immigration questions from both a spatial and a legal perspective.
Despite the growth of scholarship in this field, official networks of researchers are still relatively young. Just a few years ago, I helped to start the Legal Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers along with John Carr, himself an advisee of geographer Steve Herbert, whose work on police geographies was also pivotal in my own education. The Legal Geography CRN of the Law & Society Association was created a few years ago and is now run by Sandy Kedar and Tugba Basaran. Sandy and Tugba were kind enough to host a legal geography pre-conference at the LSA conference in Lisbon a few weeks ago that brought together scholars from around the world.
Although professional networks are growing, however, there still isn’t a dedicated academic journal for legal geography. It's not unusual for sub-disciplines to have their own academic journals: Political Geography, the Journal of Economic Geography, the Journal of Historical Geography—all of these are real academic journals that provide a forum for intellectual discussion. But nothing like that exists for legal geography.
There are many reasons I am excited to see this project take shape. In the absence of an academic journal, I wanted to create something that could serve as a dedicated space for legal geographers to share their work, which is what hope Law & Space will do. (We are calling it an “un”-journal, because although it aspires to be curated and academic, it is not an official journal.) I also value sharing academic research with more people and amplifying research projects, especially projects by graduate students, that are fascinating but which most people won’t hear about otherwise. And I wanted to teachers and professors to be able to use the site as a resource for short, digestible reading assignments that bring legal geography alive for students.
I was inspired in so small part by the work of non-traditional academic outlets like Border Criminologies, Society and Space’s online forum, Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies, and The Conversation, as well as my own experience writing for The Hill and other online outlets.
I am incredibly excited about this work and I’m grateful to the editorial team that has jumped in so far, including:
Shoukia van Beek, University of Victoria
Alida Cantor, Portland State University
Sarah Klosterkamp, University of Bonn
Julia Sizek, University of California-Berkeley
Law & Space also includes support from leading scholars in the field who have agreed to join the project as advisors, including:
Nick Blomley, Simon Fraser University
Irus Braverman, University at Buffalo Law School
Jean Carmalt, City University of New York
Sandy Kedar, University of Haifa
Dominique Moran, University of Birmingham
Monica Varsanyi, CUNY Graduate Center
To learn more about legal geography, read the purpose statement for Law & Space. And if you are doing work that intersects with legal geography, consider writing for us! Reach out directly with pitches.
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Wow- very cool. Congratulations! I look forward to learning