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Residents living in close proximity to contaminated sites may experience adverse effects from financial losses and property devaluation, leading to poor mental health and physical illnesses—effects that may require compensation. The most common legal process of seeking compensation is the toxic tort—litigation pressed on the basis that contamination has harmed the victims. Several recent toxic tort class actions in Australia brought by residents living in areas affected by contamination from per‐ and poly‐fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exemplify that process. Two such actions, those at Williamtown and Richmond, provide an opportunity to explore how toxic torts currently function as a means to secure compensation, whether they mitigate the harms of the contamination and considering how spatio‐legal manoeuvres may shape the litigation. In this article, we use a legal geography approach to analyse how plaintiffs' bodies, litigants' properties, and the state are constructed and represented by parties involved in these toxic torts. Legal geographers contend that examining the spatio‐legal manoeuvres made via litigation can make visible the effects of legal action on those involved and draw out how the law and its instruments may shape places and communities. Toxic tort class actions have allowed those affected by the contamination to be heard and receive some compensation. However, we argue that they do little to alleviate plaintiffs' concerns about the effects of contamination on their health, properties, and the environment. The findings have significance given that torts will likely play an increasingly prominent role in dealing with such challenges. This article examines a recent series of toxic tort class actions brought by residents living in areas affected by contamination from per‐ and poly‐fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in New South Wales, Australia. It explores in particular how the torts function as a form of compensation for those affected by the contamination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal geographers have recently been interested in interlegality: the interactions between different legal orders governing one particular space. Contaminated land is one such space governed by multiple legal orders; however, it is yet to receive great attention in legal geography. In Australia, different authorities and bodies cooperate together in a responsive regulatory framework to prevent contamination and then manage cases where contamination has occurred, although this process is mostly coordinated at the level of the state. This article evaluates the framework by reference to a case where the contamination, by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), has crossed jurisdictional boundaries in Williamtown, in New South Wales, Australia. This cross‐boundary incursion has complicated management responses, and may have resulted in contradicting forms of regulatory implementation by different legal orders and a break down in accountability. Ultimately, such findings point to the need for the current regulatory framework to be adapted to better deal with situations of spatial and legal complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Botany Wetlands are the contemporary remnant of a formerly extensive coastal freshwater wetland in the inner-urban suburbs of Sydney (Australia). This site supports a range of ecosystem services, including human physical and mental health benefits, filtration of stormwater runoff from a highly urban and industrial catchment, and accommodation space for floodwater. The wetlands also provide habitat to migratory water birds and act as a connective habitat corridor and refuge for native flora and fauna including endangered ecological communities recognised in state and national legislation. Current management strategies and 'on the ground' practices are informed by a hierarchy of laws and management plans that act to create and reinforce a specific narrative in the material landscape. Here we consider the ecological history of the wetlands, derived from paleoecological data, in the context of this complex network of governance entanglements. We argue that the system bears little resemblance to its long-term character and has been made and continually re-made by a portmanteau of inflexible regulatory structures. We suggest that maintaining ecosystem services in such a complex, hybridized sociolegal-biophysical system requires a critical view of both the power relations and physical processes that shape it., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Societies are now squarely facing the risks of environmental and climatic change, and developed coastlines are ground zero. Climate change will cause damage to, or loss of, coastal property – property that, in most Western societies, is considered a high net value asset. This paper examines cultural ideas about private property and the complexities of using land use planning law as an enabler of climate change adaptation. It reports the findings of qualitative research that explores how residents living in coastal Australia respond to the risks to their property and to the places they live that are posed by sea level rise and other coastal climate change‐related risks. By reporting how residents experience their material coastal environment, and how they relate with and to ideas of "property" in a coastal environmental change context, this paper contributes to both coastal policy and to legal geography scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical legal pluralism acknowledges both the multiple sources and forms of law, and their dynamic interaction, within singular geographical spaces at whatever scales they are defined. Challenging conventional constructs of law and jurisdiction, the articles in this themed section draw on the ideas of legal pluralism, justice and spatial conflict to explore the experience, interaction, impact and possibilities of the plurality of laws in particular and diverse geographical contexts. Encompassing a wide-ranging geographical scope and pluralistic approach to the idea of law, these articles present fresh analyses and novel case studies from Australia, UK, Cambodia, Indonesia, USA, Thailand and Aotearoa New Zealand, which collectively reflect the richly textured and diversely oriented work of legal geographers. They raise important and challenging questions about law as a living materiality and about place as a legal agent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are legal and moral imperatives to protect biological resources and the ‘traditional knowledge’ associated with them. These imperatives derive from complex legal geographies: international law (such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol), State and federal laws, Indigenous customary law, codes of ethics and research protocols. This paper reports on a ‘patent landscape’ analysis of patents that refer to Australian plant species for which there is Indigenous Australian knowledge. We have identified several patents of potential new biopiracy concern. The paper highlights the way in which actors can gain private property monopolies over biological resources and associated traditional knowledge, even though there are overlapping sovereign rights and Indigenous rights claims. Regulatory gaps need to be closed nationally to fully govern the diverse human–plant bio-geographies in Australia. Further, Indigenous laws and governance have largely been ignored by these actors. We suggest that the introduction of ‘disclosure of origin’ requirements in patent applications,sui generisIndigenous knowledge protections, the development of biocultural protocols, and a more nationally consistent system for ‘access and benefit-sharing’ are required to ensure more ‘fair and equitable’ use of plants and Indigenous knowledge in/from Australia, and to ensure the recognition of Indigenous rights to knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent commentary on future research directions for legal geography highlights the need for studies that are historically grounded and focused on human-environment interactions in rural settings. As a current, controversial land use in Australia, unconventional gas ( UG) development provides an ideal lens through which researchers can investigate these themes. Utilising emerging international literature and current Australian examples, this paper surveys major trends in the Australian literature relating to UG, before exploring some of the ways in which Australian legal geographers might contribute constructively to community debates around this resource. Seeking to encourage further analysis, this paper contributes to this developing literature by focusing on two key areas: the various legal actors involved in UG development in Australia (including their regulatory choices, spatial interpretations, expertise, and influence) and the implications for legal geography where attempts are made to establish 'social licence' through contractual arrangements between industry and individual landholders. This article also delves into the place of Indigenous Australians in relation to UG extraction and the questions this resource raises about land use conflicts in Australia more generally - offering suggestions for comparative international studies and further critique at the domestic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their programmatic statement towards an Australian perspective on legal geography, Bartel et al. acknowledge that 'it is perhaps in the institution of property and the regulation of land use that law has its most obvious overlap with geography ... in a settler society such as Australia'. Given this statement, it is surprising that the seven co-authors fail to acknowledge the formidable contributions already made by Australian geographers within a highly relevant, substantial research agenda, namely the evolution of lease tenures as policy instruments in shaping rural land settlement and rural society. The earliest contributions on lease tenures were made by an eminent group of historical geographers enquiring into the evolution of a distinctive, adaptable portfolio of Australian land tenures and other resource rights in response to the challenges of frontier squatter settlement and the subsequent policy agenda in pursuit of closer settlement. Their successors have focused on the contemporary relevance of lease tenures as potentially adaptable instruments towards sustainability and coexistence. Geographers have also acted as consultants, policy advisers, advocates, and expert witnesses through consultancy reports, discussion papers, newspaper articles, and news reports. There is a strong case to be made that, together with Aboriginal land rights and native title, these two research agendas have provided the most substantial and coherent scholarly contributions to Australian legal geography. This deficiency in the review of Australian research may well be an outcome from a comparable deficiency in theorising property rights within the subdiscipline internationally. If Australian legal geography is to fulfil its potential, greater recognition needs to be given to foundational Australian contributions to this subdiscipline and to property rights theory in the matter of natural resources, notably land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law is a powerful influence on people and place. Law both creates and is created by the relationship between people and place, although it rarely acknowledges this. Law frequently operates as if space does not matter. Law and legal processes, therefore, deserve greater attention from geographers. Legal geography is an emerging field of inquiry that facilitates much-needed attention to the interrelationships among the environment, people and social institutions, including formal laws but also informal rules, norms and lore. Legal geographers seek to make the invisible visible: to bring the law into the frame of geography, and space and place into focus for the law. Both critical and applied in approach, legal geography offers descriptive, analytical and normative insight into economics, justice, property, power, geopolitics, governance and scale. As such it can enrich most areas of geographic inquiry as well as contribute to current policy debates about the regulation of space and place. Legal geography is a way for enlarged appreciations of relationality, materiality, multiscalarity and agency to be used to interrogate and reform the law. This introduction to a special 'themed paper' section of Geographical Research provides a window on legal geography scholarship, including its history, contribution and ambition. The papers in the collection explore issues grounded in the legal geographies paradigm, variously analysing matters empirically detailed while engaging in broader, theoretical debates and using both Australian and international case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Licit narcotics production in Australia is based on the cultivation of a poppy crop restricted to Tasmania under local, national, and international regulation. Its legal geographical analysis is advanced by drawing on the thinking about 'the nomosphere' and 'topology' developed by David Delaney and John Allen, respectively. Australia continues to lead global production of licit narcotics as distinct new entities, relationships, and capacities have been enabled by differentiating between the constituent alkaloids morphine and thebaine with a loophole identified in US legislation of the 80/20 rule. Nomospheric and topological lenses are used to focus on the intensive, emergent qualities of the industry in addition to the traditional topography revealed in its scalar, networked territorialisation. A renewed understanding of the spatial workings and power plays relevant can inform possible transformation around narcotics production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses two cases brought by aboriginal Australians against the Australian government acquisition of long leases of their land under the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007. These leases are conspicuous, particularly in that the government always made it clear that it would not take up its right to exclusive possession of the leased land, and has not done so. The leases have not been used to evict residents, as some feared; nor to pursue mining or agricultural activity. Socio-legal theories centered on the right to exclusive possession cannot account for these leases. The article explores the use of property under the 2007 Act, the legal geographies of the areas subject to the leases and the political potency of property beyond exclusive possession, and suggests an understanding of property as a spatially contingent relation of belonging. Specifically, the article argues that property is productive of temporal and spatial order and so can function as a tool of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]