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This paper traces the history of remoteness in contract law, namely the legal formants (in Rodolfo Sacco's terms) constraining the availability of contract damages in various legal systems. Our journey takes us through different times, continents and cultures, from the eighteenth century to the twenty–first century, across the law of France, United States, England and Wales, India and Australia, among other jurisdictions. While it might seem that civilian and common law traditions have very different morphological legal forms, once a closer historical, cultural, and anthropological gaze is turned upon the legal formants involved, it can be seen that remoteness discloses a shared concern which may be common to many human societies and cultures. In other words, as a matter of social experience, humans who enter into transactions generally realise that it is impossible to know the future, or to know what all outcomes of the transaction will be. Consequently, it is recognised that it would be unfair and unjust to hold a defendant liable for all outcomes, and as our journey will show, legal systems seek guidance from other legal systems in their efforts to deal with this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that we lack scholarship that analyses EU law spatially. A spatial reading of EU law can help reveal the incidence, contingencies, pathologies and contestation of EU law. This paper looks at one specific spatial dimension of EU law: the interaction between, and the construction of, the urban and its hinterland. It suggests that EU law is much more sensitive to the spatial dynamics that underpin urban life than rural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comment critiques the idea of geographic regions being "left behind." It argues that the term frames the regions in question as passive experiencers of natural phenomena, in turn obfuscating the structural forces that have shaped those regions and local populations' efforts to pursue better living conditions. The comment draws on three examples from the rural United States to illustrate how the designation of being "left behind" serves to mask subjugation and struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of wetlands as places worthy of protection has been recognised since at least 1975, with the passage of the global wetland treaty, the Ramsar Convention (officially the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat). However, over the past 50 years wetlands have declined and at least 35% of natural wetlands have been lost with more at risk of extinction. Unfortunately, wetland habitats continue to suffer, despite the existence of protection regimes. In this context, this paper invites us to push the way we think about current wetland regulation and protection. Contemporary conceptions of wetlands that underpin dominant protection and management regimes tend to characterise wetlands in a way that overlooks all essential elements of the ecosystem. Our concern is to illuminate the plight of wetland ecosystems as interconnected waterscapes requiring more than a selective or partial regulative protection effort. We argue for a ‘rights of wetlands’ framing for a more holistic approach to regulate the management of these key ecosystems. We situate our argument using a Ramsar-listed wetland example, the Towra Point Nature Reserve, located in Botany Bay (Kamay), Sydney, Australia. Ultimately, we invite a recalibration of regulatory efforts for wetland conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid increase in the use of remote platforms in court hearings has fundamentally changed the nature of hearings and produced a productive point of reflection for digital and legal geographies. This paper uses geographical theorisations of space to make sense of digital developments in court space. It proposes that the introduction of remote platforms generates three spatial ruptures in court hearings: the space of remote hearings is dispersed across multiple sites, stretched into non‐traditional justice spaces, and sometimes snapped back into the physical hearing centre. Analysing these spatial ruptures through ethnographic research conducted in immigration bail hearings in the UK offers insights into the relationship between physical and virtual hearing spaces. Specifically, it reveals three things about this relationship: that physical and virtual hearing spaces are relational; that remoteness does not annihilate hearing space; and that remoteness can be best understood as existing on a continuum. In doing so, this paper seeks to bring legal geography's well‐developed understanding of court space into conversation with recent digital developments in courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I use legal geography to analyze the way in which the jurisprudence of the Labor Cassation Chamber of the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice assumes spatial imaginaries on the evidentiary standard of cohabitation as a couple. The factual pattern chosen is the study of the possible recognition of the survivor’s pension for the partner of the deceased; therefore, I present two arguments. First, that the spatial assumptions on which the concept of cohabitation as a couple is built are contradictory. Secondly, that when it comes to the existence of sexual relations within the framework of the couple’s relationship, the Supreme Court uses the public/private binary, traditionally used to oppress women, to emancipate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the 2010s, rivers have captured the legal imagination of judges, legislators and activists alike, as part of a rapidly growing phenomenon described by UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David Boyd as 'a legal revolution that could save the world'. Investigating river cases in jurisdictions as diverse as Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia, India, the United States and Australia, and following Nicole Graham's suggestion that the non‐human world is constantly reconstituted within an all‐encompassing legal cosmology for which any observable 'thing', any 'object', any landscape, is always, inherently, and inevitably a 'lawscape', this paper explores the legal and the ontological nature of 'the river'. By casting traditional riparian doctrines against novel rights of Nature judgments, the paper highlights the interconnected and interdependent legal relationship between artificially construed human and non‐human worlds, and observes a series of perceptible generational shifts in the legal and ontological treatment of rivers, from an abstract near‐neglect, to a rights‐based discourse, and ending (for the moment at least) in a deeply relational re‐conceptualisation. By casting traditional riparian doctrines against novel rights of nature judgments, this paper highlights the interconnected and interdependent legal relationship between artificially construed human and non‐human worlds, and observes a series of perceptible generational shifts in the legal and ontological treatment of rivers, from an abstract near‐neglect, to a rights‐based discourse, and ending (for the moment at least) in a deeply relational re‐conceptualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly work in the field of legal geography has grown dramatically in recent decades. While much legal geography scholarship has been influenced by a European-North American perspective, we argue that a distinctive legal geography scholarship also emanates from outside the dominant perspective. Here, we review research from Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa and label this work as Antipodean legal geography (ALG). We suggest ALG research has made a significant contribution to global legal geography scholarship through an emphasis on environmental law and policy problem solving and through efforts to de-colonialise and expand legal geography's remit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report on legal geography explores everyday law and how law is discussed as lived, performed and re-created in mundane life. Everyday law means a legal pluralism that also includes informal parts of law, such as customs, norms, and alternative legal systems. It also refers to the manifestations, performances, contestations, and constitution of the law in mundane places. Focusing on ordinariness opens paths for thinking the normalized and taken-for-granted aspects of the law. Everyday law is mostly experienced at micro-scale—related to our bodies, homes, and neighborhoods. This report concentrates on these, with the focus on subjectivity, relationality, and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Produce prescriptions are nutrition incentive programs that focus on specific populations diagnosed with chronic diseases. Since 2010 these programs have multiplied across the United States, with much of this growth attributed to expanded federal funding in the 2014 and 2018 Farm Bills. Framed as both “commonsense” solutions and a novel approach to food access and public health, they have been institutionalized within the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program. Although framed as novel, prescriptions and dietary interventions are not new areas within nutrition policy. This article brings nutrition policy into the realm of legal geographic inquiry to examine how recent federal appropriations relate to not only social anxieties over diet and nutrition, but historical and contemporary concerns over public use of, and government spending on, federal benefit programs for targeted populations. This examination expands legal geographies literature through discussions of the “body” within law and how federal power comes to govern specific contexts. It argues we are seeing a new enclosure of federal benefits through the precision welfare of targeting individual bodies and their metabolic functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent cross-fertilisation among the fields of critical legal geography, political ecology and environmental ethics has created opportunities to examine new legal designations for more-than-human entities such as rivers. In particular, theorisations of how more-than-human assemblages ontologically co-constitute the law challenge interpretations of legal structures as purely human creations and encourage scholars to examine manifestations of non-anthropocentrism, which is defined here as an ethical position that elevates non-humans’ moral standing to that of humans. This article adopts an historical case study approach to examine an environmental conflict that occurred in the 1970s involving non-anthropocentrism and Montana water law. Specifically, this article draws from critical legal geography’s understanding of the law and the environment as being co-constituted to argue that both elements of a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic and the influence of Yellowstone River as a more-than-human entity shaped Montana Fish and Game’s position during the Yellowstone River Basin water reservation process. This article further argues that the combination of these influences affected legal interpretation of the 1973 Montana Water Use Act’s 'minimum stream flow' text and helped reconstitute the Act to include non-anthropocentric elements.

Abstract: A proposed project will take water from an aquifer in the California desert to the coast. Lacking final approvals more than 30 years after it started, the project remains a plan despite sizeable opposition. What is its secret? In this paper, I examine the imaginaries of the underground aquifer underneath the lands of Cadiz Inc, the project proponent. While local theories insist the company is at the centre of a Chinatown conspiracy, I argue that the company stays alive through regulatory alchemy, a term that reveals the magic at the heart of scientific and regulatory approval processes. I examine narratives of the aquifer in environmental compliance and financial reporting in order to reveal how regulatory processes become the conditions of profit‐making, building on debates in critical legal geography and political ecology.

What is a wall to a child? It may be an obstacle course, a balance beam, a "car," a seat, a home for spiders and ladybugs, a place to play hide and seek, a support to lean on when learning to walk, a perch for cats, a musical instrument to be played with sticks and hands. Rather than just a barrier, the wall can also become an incitement to explore that which lies beyond it. So how does a wall become just a territorial marker—a designation of private property, an imposing boundary line that cuts through space, dividing mine and yours? And what can children's engagement with the boundary, and the legalized attempts to prevent and punish their boundary-crossing, tell us about the social work of private property? In addressing these questions, we aim to take seriously the iterative "why?" of small children when confronted with territorial rules and related violence. [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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Court ethnographies have commonly relied on the physical presence of the ethnographers. This paper explores the opportunities and the challenges of conducting court ethnographies without this physical presence. Specifically, it examines what it means to conduct remote ethnographies of legal processes where neither the ethnographer nor the other hearing participants are physically co‐present. The sudden shift towards remote hearings in fieldwork conducted during the COVID‐19 pandemic presented an opportunity to compare in‐person and remote ethnographic methods. Through a case study of bail hearings in the immigration tribunal in the UK, this paper explores the value and challenges associated with conducting remote ethnographies and asks how they can help to shed light on the impact of absences in legal events. Court ethnographies have commonly relied on the physical presence of the ethnographers. This paper explores the opportunities and the challenges of conducting court ethnographies without this physical presence. Specifically, it examines what it means to conduct remote ethnographies of legal processes where neither the ethnographer nor the other hearing participants are physically co‐present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many coastal nations have endorsed the Blue Economy as both an economic and environmental opportunity, despite numerous questions as to how industrial expansion into deep ocean waters might be regulated for sustainability. Aquaculture is one industry actively promoting a move offshore, with numerous offshore leases in development. Drawing on the history of aquaculture in the nearshore, and relying on a processual approach to property, we explore questions around the regulation of privatized ocean spaces: What can court cases involving aquaculture in the nearshore tell us about the role of law in promoting sustainable offshore ocean spaces? And what in turn does this suggest about extractive capitalism, the privatization of ocean spaces, and the law? We examine 46 Canadian court cases which cover a 30-year time frame and multiple Canadian jurisdictions. We argue that there are lessons here regarding the questionable ability of law to effectively regulate existing or future aquaculture operations once privatization emerges. The lessons from these Canadian court cases, taken together with a burgeoning literature on legal geography, more-than-human methodologies, and critical environmental law, suggest the varied legal dimensions of deep-sea aquaculture frontier imaginaries and highlight the real limits to regulating the extraction of resources in this perceived open space (terra nullius). We highlight crucial barriers to sustainability through what we are calling jurisdictional opaqueness in regulatory issues. The results include poor regulation and overlapping or contested jurisdictions, which relates in turn to inadequate consultation, frequent environmental problems (toxic chemicals, anoxia, salmon escapes, marine debris), and scientific disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large share of the African American population in the U.S. lives in poor areas characterized by high unemployment, low housing quality, and unhealthy living conditions, thus making low socioeconomic status a critical risk factor. Consequently, the higher Covid-19 death toll paid by Black Americans has been linked to the Redlining policies introduced by the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s. These policies are believed to have contributed to the development of segregated neighborhoods and ghettoization. Nowadays, we implicitly support a new form of Redlining, which comes in the different shape of the formal/informal market divide in housing. In fact, two pathways to homeownership have always existed in this legal framework. On the one hand, there is a well-established legal regime that provides families with a secure and marketable title to their homes. On the other hand, an informal regime is applied where the most vulnerable citizens (such as Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, and the poor) buy 'on contract'. This is similar to an installment land contract whereby the seller can easily repossess the house since they are entitled to evict the would-be owner even when a single monthly payment is missed. Indeed, such contracts grew in number particularly in the aftermath of the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, when the lack of equal access to credit for homeownership led many people to buy houses 'on contract'. The article aims to show how these predatory lending practices, by fostering ghettoization, favored inequalities and jeopardized the spatial allocation of justice in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the unfulfilled promise of interdisciplinarity in comparative law and suggests a new focus for it: namely, in legal geography's study of the multiple dimensions of law and space. This article maintains that comparative law may benefit from a fresh dialogue with legal geographers, whose critical perspective, in both theory and practice, to law and space has enabled them to develop their field in a truly interdisciplinary way. This article will argue that it is time for comparative law scholars to enter into a more constructive dialogue with legal geographers, accessing their more systematic conceptualisations of space, place and scale in order to better understand – and critique – the entangled relations of law and space in these, our 'interesting' times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manufacturing of colonial legal spatialities in the Age of Discovery has traditionally been studied by historians, human geographers, and cartographers. Seldom have legal scholars examined it. This essay aims to fill the gap in legal research and assesses processes of spatial production that took place in colonies by adopting a legal-geographical approach. Special attention is paid to how the English, and later British Empires manufactured both terrestrial and oceanic spaces. The essay maintains that, within what this article calls the 'Anglo/British Empire', the integrated geographies of land and sea were facilitated by some intrinsic qualities of the English common law. Its legal coding devised a holistic approach that captured the whole earth even beyond the divide between land and sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent cross-fertilisation among the fields of critical legal geography, political ecology and environmental ethics has created opportunities to examine new legal designations for more-than-human entities such as rivers. In particular, theorisations of how more-than-human assemblages ontologically co-constitute the law challenge interpretations of legal structures as purely human creations and encourage scholars to examine manifestations of non-anthropocentrism, which is defined here as an ethical position that elevates non-humans' moral standing to that of humans. This article adopts an historical case study approach to examine an environmental conflict that occurred in the 1970s involving non-anthropocentrism and Montana water law. Specifically, this article draws from critical legal geography's understanding of the law and the environment as being co-constituted to argue that both elements of a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic and the influence of Yellowstone River as a more-than-human entity shaped Montana Fish and Game's position during the Yellowstone River Basin water reservation process. This article further argues that the combination of these influences affected legal interpretation of the 1973 Montana Water Use Act's 'minimum stream flow' text and helped reconstitute the Act to include non-anthropocentric elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian conservation targets commonly focus on preserving a vaguely defined ecological baseline, often conceptualised as a pre-European, 'natural' state. For instance, environmental legislation protects 'Endangered Ecological Communities' (EECs), which purportedly represent remnants of naturally occurring biota. However, EECs are often classified without long-term data, making it unclear as to whether the community being protected is indeed 'natural'. In this essay, we use history, ecology, and geography to map the long-term socio-environmental evolution of Sydney's freshwater wetland EECs, which were once key features of Australia's biggest city. Our data show that today's remnant wetlands are different from those of the early 1800s, highlighting how quickly landscapes can be misremembered. We encourage a reimagining of these wetlands not as snapshots of the past, but as human-impacted places with educational, ecological and historical importance. Our work emphasises the relevance of long-term, cross-disciplinary data for effective conservation, while highlighting limitations in post-colonial land management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water scarcity in the Western US, through the lens of political ecology, can be understood as inextricably shaped by power dynamics, governance structures, and legal practices of resource allocation. Water allocation in the region is determined largely by the legal doctrine of Prior Appropriation, the 'first in time, first in right' principle. However, prior appropriation is fundamentally based in anthropocentric and settler colonial assumptions, and in light of drought, climate change, and shifting social and environmental values, the system has been critiqued as inadequate to meet contemporary water challenges. Despite challenging historical legacies, water managers in the Western US are developing a range of strategies to work around or within prior appropriation to secure environmental flows for rivers and aquatic species. In this article we use political ecology and diverse economies approaches to consider the challenges of, and challenges to, prior appropriation. We examine a diverse set of practices, work-arounds, and creative strategies being used to secure instream flows, and discuss how these strategies affirm or challenge prior appropriation, how they reinforce or challenge inequities, and how they reform or re-envision water allocation in ways that may open up potential for social and environmental justice.

This paper highlights a disjunct between geomorphic concepts of braided riverbed lateral boundaries and legal definitions used to decide these boundaries in New Zealand—a country that hosts over 150 gravel‐bed braided rivers. These powerful morphodynamic systems are prone to recurrent bar reworking and channel shift. When parts of the riverbed are temporarily abandoned by active channels, they are vulnerable to land use intensification. Associated flood protection measures that often follow intensification constrict the rivers' capacity to adjust to ever‐changing flows of water and sediment. Despite the rivers' vulnerability and constriction, New Zealand law defines braided rivers in a way that limits local councils' authority to manage land use within the braidplain. This paper explores the relationship between the law and science of braided rivers, demonstrating how legislative reforms underway in 2023 express the ways in which particular social processes play out in the landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The UN Protection of Civilians sites in South Sudan were separated from adjacent towns by barbed wire fences, mounds, watchtowers and patrolling peacekeepers. Building on and contributing to recent legal geography scholarship on jurisdictions, we explore how legal norms, institutions and rivalrous claims of jurisdiction remake these places of protection and blur spatial boundaries by creating trails that entangle the worlds inside and outside of the sites. The article also provides an unusual example of a powerful public authority – the United Nations – resisting claims that they have jurisdiction. The article is based on qualitative research in Wau and Bentiu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the spatio‐legal dynamics of marine protected areas and their relation to socio‐environmental justice. It adopts a critical legal geography perspective to unpack ocean lawscape configurations triggered by territorial claims, the international mechanisms for maritime boundary‐making, and state sovereignty instruments. It is empirically focused on the Seaflower marine biosphere reserve, a protected area amid a geopolitical contestation between Nicaragua and Colombia in the southwestern Caribbean. By analysing its spatio‐legal history over two decades (2000–2021), the paper sheds light on the marine legalities of this region, which are often contradictory and overlapping. Focusing on the marine lawscape of Colombia, it explores the relationship between protected areas and marine territorialisation, also reflecting on the governance regimes' effects on indigenous livelihoods and marine biodiversity. The paper concludes that (i) marine protected areas are regularly being disrupted, re‐bordered, and reconfigured by the international ocean regimes governing the oceans; (ii) the link between the creation and management of marine protected areas and territorial jurisdiction compromises social and environmental justice, and (iii) inclusion of indigenous legalities might enhance equity and sustainability in ocean governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how so-called Brexit, that is the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union (EU), has modified the regional geography of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs). The latter are therapies deriving from cell manipulation, gene editing, tissue engineering, or a combination of these techniques. Their development and delivery have been realised through research collaborations and commercial relations of international scope. In the EU, this has happened by means of a complex distribution of commercial activities and legal responsibilities. With Brexit, three main kinds of reconfigurations have occurred: the relocation of research and manufacturing activities; the reorganisation of quality control tests aimed to manage clinical risks; and the redistribution of legal responsibilities and representatives. This technical and legal reconfiguration is captured here by means of theoretical insights from the emerging domain of legal geography. Drawing on interviews conducted with both EU and UK professionals involved in ATMP development, this paper reveals the main challenges brought by Brexit to the current and future configuration of the ATMP landscape in the EU and the UK. Furthermore, it demonstrates how shifts in legal arrangements impact on science-intensive domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a critical legal geography approach that incorporates theories of law, space, and power, this paper explores how the public health surveillance of dengue fever is utilised by the state in an ongoing 'war against the mosquito' in Singapore. Here, the state deploys biopower as a form of spatio-legal 'lawscaping' – consisting of and implicating a host of actors, institutions, and objects – in order to seek and eradicate sources of stagnant water (and the mosquitoes that breed in them) in spaces across the city. The paper demonstrates how, in combating dengue fever this way, the public health surveillance and regulation of dengue fever in Singapore informs four distinct yet interconnected forms of spatio-legal materiality and normativity: a) the inspection of space; b) the invisibilisation of death; c) the implementation of self-regulatory objects; and d) the illegality of uncleanliness. Therefore, in tracing the public health surveillance of dengue fever as it relates to the biopolitical regulation of stagnant water, this paper is also able to evince how the state uses spatio-legal means to govern a range of sites as well as a host of human and non-human bodies, and in doing so reveal how state biopower can be exerted across different species. At the same time, these acts of biopolitical lawscaping serve to flatten different typologies of urban space – be they public, private, or even transient (or under construction). In its desire to eradicate mosquito breeding grounds, the state reduces urban space to that which is clean and unclean – even if unwittingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydropower is now the largest source of renewable energy worldwide. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that current hydropower capacity will need to double by 2050 in order to transition to net zero and to arrest the rise of global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius. Much of the currently built and planned dams are on rivers shared between two or more countries. This raises the risk of increased inter-state conflicts. However, to exploit hydropower peacefully, the impact on local communities must also be considered. This foregrounds the need to build inclusive institutions that can mediate the different interests, norms, and values held by communities located across different scales. The article examines the role of international river basin organizations to manage this legal pluralism in shared river basins. In many basins globally, such as the Lower Mekong, the Columbia, the Zambezi, or the Senegal, international river basin organizations are tasked with the development of shared water resources. To understand to what extent river basin organizations can mediate the legal pluralism in a shared basin, the article develops an international legal geography approach to the governance of transboundary waters in an attempt to uncover marginalization and disempowerment in the process of law-making. It therefore expands the analytical scope of legal geography to the study of transnational spaces, in this case complex ecosystems for which there are no fixed jurisdictional boundaries. It then applies this approach to the case study of the Lower Mekong basin. Findings indicate that the Mekong River Commission, despite attempts to include project-affected people in decision-making, largely operates within a Westphalian framework of sovereignty to the detriment of more inclusive forms of governance. Project affected communities are largely unable to exert influence and are relegated to participation in alternative forums. These forums, or counter publics as Yong called them, are disconnected from official processes. While they give rise to marginalized voices and enable the creation of inclusive and participatory spaces, the exclusionary official decision-making processes continue to produce significant tension and conflict potential as hydropower is championed globally as a clean, climate friendly form of energy. As hydropower is set to double by 2050, inclusive participatory institutions in basins worldwide must be built to navigate complex stakeholder interests and to benefit those who are otherwise likely to lose out in net zero transitions. These findings are relevant for other shared basins, particularly across Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America where hydropower is booming. An international approach to legal geography can foreground these hidden and marginalized voices and help identify ways to build inclusive institutions for the governance of shared resources.

The aim of this article is to identify possible problem-subject interfaces that encapsulate the legal perspective in the discipline of socio-economic geography and spatial management. With a view to the article's objective being achieved, an indication of the general relations pertaining between the geographical sciences and the legal sciences is given, prior to an identification and presentation of key theoretical currents making it easier to clarify the role of the legal dimension in socio-economic geography and the spatial economy. A particular emphasis is here placed on the institutional approach and legal geography. There is then an identification of the most relevant topics in which there is a relationship between the legal dimension and socio-economic geography and the spatial economy. In practice, the two groups of issues identified were those in which the legal dimension is already recognised (albeit with the direction needing to be developed), or else those in which the legal dimension either goes unrecognised, or is only recognised marginally. Within each group, key issues are pointed out, and the most thematically relevant areas of law assigned to them. An attempt has also been made to identify key directions for future research and scholarly discussion. The article also serves as an invitation to further reflection and discussion. As shown above, both the institutional framing and that relating to the 'branch' that is the geography of law (legal geography) may be reflected adequately in foreseeable research fields, as well as problems to be identified and clarified. Even though the role of other branches of law is not neglected, it is necessary to state that the legal dimension relating to administrative law should be specially analysed within the framework of socio-economic geography and the spatial economy. Significantly, the internal branch structure of administrative law seems to coincide to a large extent with the 'branch' division of socio-economic geography and the spatial economy, even if this would of course not preclude more comprehensive or even holistic approaches in the future. The issues as presented lead us to a conclusion that the links between socio--economic geography and the spatial economy and the legal sciences are strong, even if this does not gain adequate reflection in research, or in theoretical and methodological progress. The article thus also serves as an invitation to further reflection and discussion. To that end, key conceptual and theoretical-methodological foundations are identified by the author, with a view to the discussion in question being guided. As has been demonstrated, both the institutional approach and that relating to the 'sectoral' geography of law (legal geography) can gain adequate reflection in foreseeable research fields, along with problems to be identified and clarified. A further line of work should be to detail better the relationship between the indicated theoretical frameworks and the issues identified, with these also being translated into proposals for concrete research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal geography seeks to understand the complex interactions between people, law, and space. It exists as an interdisciplinary endeavor, incorporating intellectual threads from critical legal studies, political geography, sociology, and related work. The purpose of this focus article is to introduce legal geography to water scholars as practical means to study law and space to human–water relationships (i.e., hydrosocial relations). We start by tracing a history of legal geography's development as a field and highlight important works in legal geography past and present. We then focus on ways legal geography has been utilized to explore four broad topics within the scope of human water: rights to water, water governance, water as imagined and represented, and value of water. We conclude that legal geography frameworks applied to water research may be useful for furthering the understanding of many of the issues important to WIRES Water readers. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Water as Imagined and RepresentedHuman Water > Rights to WaterHuman Water > Water Governance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the Piikani Nation's attempts to challenge the Oldman River Dam, as this struggle highlights the challenges Indigenous communities can face in attempting to articulate water and land relationships through the languages and structures of settler colonial law. Completed in 1991, the dam faced multiple forms of opposition by Piikani members, including lawsuits and an attempt by community activists representing the Lonefighters Society to divert the river around an existing irrigation weir. For this article, I focus on how Piikani Nation members attempted to assert their geographic relationships with the Oldman River through participation in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Review process. Within this process, Piikani elders, activists, and community advocates mobilized various conceptions of law, such as treaty rights and Piikani and Blackfoot legal traditions. This article therefore seeks to answer this question: How do Indigenous forms of jurisdiction articulate with Canadian legal and regulatory fora, such as the Environmental Assessment Review process? To answer these questions, I draw from both critical political economy and Indigenous geographies, as I argue that in struggles against the capitalist reterritorialization of Indigenous places, it is through the assertions of competing legal jurisdictions that these struggles tend to find their most profound expression. Specifically, I use the concept of articulation from Marxian political economy, suggesting this theory, in conversation with legal pluralism scholarship, provides a generative framework for critically interrogating how Indigenous legal orders interact with Canadian law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the law codifies infrastructural risks into the farm–labor relation, subjecting farmworkers living in U.S. migrant labor camps to conditions considered illegal in otherwise similar residential geographies. To do so, it explores how the labor camp operates as an infrastructure to maximize harvest, arrange labor availability, and embed overlordship—the power to direct other human potentialities through control of their total environment—in a contained geography wherein access to water, shelter, and bodily security is conditional on the employment relation. Using case law pertaining to labor camps in New York, it analyzes the racializing effects of mundane technicalities such as how heating and water systems are inspected, sanitary code is enforced, and housing is classified. Building on insights on infrastructural forms of racial power, it shows how housing and utility systems cement overlordship into the operational landscape of U.S. agriculture and food systems via both the broader immigrant surveillance apparatus and farmworkers' exclusion from the common-law protections "ordinary" tenants enjoy, such as locally enforced building codes and safety standards. It finds that geographic isolation, infrastructural disconnection, and uneven code enforcement materialize "a pattern of physical restraint" and "real or threatened harm," components of the legal definition of involuntary servitude. In doing so, it (1) advances a theory of racial overlordship as an infrastructural relation maintained via uneven standards of human treatment, (2) traces the material durability of postemancipation racial overlordship into the present, and (3) demonstrates the powers of camps to variably confine and banish disposable workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens when we walk past a faded mural? What changes when that mural is finally restored? As we place our feet on the ground, and brush past a painted brick wall, is it possible to see, feel, or listen to law and its stories told, retold, heard, or not heard? Perhaps, but this requires some quite challenging conceptual shifts in how we experience and understand the materialization of law, and its locations, especially when multiple laws inhabit the same place. My argument is that different types of law inhabit physical spaces differently, whether state, federal, local, or Aboriginal. Sometimes, in fact often, different laws simultaneously inhabit the same place, as in the case of a mural called "40,000 Years" that runs down a long, low brick wall in inner-city Redfern in Sydney, Australia. In this article, I delve into the paint, bricks, and restoration of this mural to unravel how it shares, hosts, holds, refracts, and aesthetically materializes different types of visible and invisible laws, including a variety of western and Aboriginal laws. When multiple laws cohabit, such as they do with this mural located on a city street that is also Aboriginal Country, fractal patterns of different types of law emerge, criss-crossing the physical landscape, creating what I call a "kaleidoscopic legal place." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Global energy policies embracing a transition to unconventional oil and gas development are hallmarks of many developed nations. Among these, the United Kingdom has framed the development of shale gas as one means to transition from high‐carbon fossil‐fuel consumption to low‐carbon alternatives. Yet the introduction of this industry and recent legislation associated with it have not been without controversy. Communities throughout the United Kingdom are engaged in sustained debates concerning climate change, health, the scale of extraction footprints, securitisation, and governance. Places such as Kirby Misperton, the focus of this article, are representative of many villages where questions abound about the role of justice at all stages and scales of governmental decision‐making. Using a legal geographic lens, this article examines narratives among local residents who are actively resisting the arrival of unconventional gas. I consider how the relationships between and among energy transition, policy, and justice have been interpreted by communities and argue for inequity and risk to be addressed in more transparent ways. I contend that highlighting counter‐narratives remains essential if powerful arguments by governments and others are to be negated. Fundamentally, true justice can only prevail when all stakeholders are considered legitimate and their opinions valid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systemic failure of our land management, legal, and regulatory institutions is revealed by the serious and adverse social and environmental impacts of land use practices in private agriculture, evident in severe land and water degradation, precipitous decline in biodiversity, and reduced resilience to natural hazards and climate change. The efficacy of the standard treatment of environmental law and regulation is often hampered by the cultural and legal priority of property rights. We take a different approach, using legal geography to refocus attention on the salience and agency of place and responses to degradation, such as conservation farming and regenerative agriculture, which are reforming dominant land management cultures and institutions from within. By recognising the role of place in leading geographically responsive land use decision‐making and more sustainable, resilient, and productive agricultural practices, an alternative model of private land ownership may be possible, as well as greater environmental sustainability. For researchers, our approaches too must be sensitive and responsive to place agency and our methodologies must evolve to acknowledge the agency of place. Place agency in legal geography has great potential for application in reforming suboptimal industrial agricultural practices and legal models of property ownership, and also for revitalising our scholarship. Place agency in legal geography has great potential for application in reforming suboptimal industrial agricultural practices and legal models of property ownership. By recognising the role of place in leading geographically responsive land use decision‐making and more sustainable, resilient, and productive agricultural practices, an alternative model of private land ownership may be possible alongside greater environmental sustainability. Researchers' approaches, too, must be sensitive and responsive to place agency and our methodologies must evolve to acknowledge the agency of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shows how legal evidentiary rules intended to make trials fair also enable biodiversity loss, even in courts charged with environmental protection. The common law is premised on two types of rules. The first, substantive laws, set rules for how society should function—obstructing and punishing some behaviours while enabling and rewarding others. In contrast, procedural laws are intended to level the playing field when there is a dispute over substantive rules during litigation. This case study concerns a routine environmental dispute over land development in Sydney, Australia. It demonstrates how, by enabling courts to determine what evidence will and will not be considered, procedural rules and practices drive substantive outcomes by rendering certain places, dynamics, and connections visible and capable of judicial action while obscuring others. Specifically, the court's efforts to use evidentiary tools to make litigation more efficient drove substantive outcomes in two ways. First, work to narrow evidence to address factual disputes also narrowed the court's geographic scale of analysis to the property boundaries of the site, thus obscuring broader threats to a critically endangered ecological community. Second, these procedural evidentiary decisions drove substantive outcomes undermining biodiversity protection, while concealing their inherently substantive nature. Combined with the tendency of the court to use procedural informality to promote compromise between the parties, and a broader juridical treatment of intact ecological communities as species that can largely be moved at will, the evidentiary rules enabled an environmentally focused court to enable the victory of development over species protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal geography is an important theoretical method aiming at the intersection of law and geography and related issues. Western scholars have made critical thinking on some traditional research fields of human geography from the perspective of legal geography, to interpret issues of space and place under the new theoretical framework of people-place-law. Political ecology is a typical interdisciplinary research field. In recent years, scholars at home and abroad have carried out fruitful explorations based on the perspective of legal geography, and accumulated a large number of cases, and enriched the theories of political ecology. This paper introduced the basic concept, connotation and research profiles of legal geography, and focused on the study of political ecology carried out from the perspective of legal geography. The literature was reviewed from three aspects: the shaping of the natural landscape by law, the complexity of natural resources and its legal response, and the legal pluralism and its contradictions in environmental control. Law is an effective means to regulate the interaction between humans and the environment, it is necessary to explore the relationship among law, people and place. By introducing the perspective of legal geography, this paper will provide a new theoretical tool for the future study of political ecology in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of EU migration on Great Yarmouth, a coastal town in Norfolk, England. Great Yarmouth had the fifth highest 'leave' vote nationally in the UK Brexit referendum, at over 70%. In this article, we want to show that Great Yarmouth has always been a town of migration but the sudden arrival of large numbers of EU nationals, exercising their free movement rights, in a relatively short space of time has created divisions in the town, divisions which may take decades to heal. Using legal geography as a prism, we offer an insight into the complex and evolving realities of European integration – and resistance to it. We argue that because EU free movement is a process, not an event, it has long-term effects, effects which have not, to-date, been fully recognised and explored. What we observe in Great Yarmouth is that free movement has, at best, been unevenly experienced by both movers and stayers and, at worst, has a divisive effect on the local community. Only by understanding the experience of migration on a particular community over time can the impact of free movement be properly understood, its consequences continuing long after Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of safety and sexual harassment risk as the pivotal element for the understandings in gender and city debates both in literature and in public policy in Colombia, which derives from understanding women's sexuality as either "kind mothers" or "chaste women" who must protect their sexuality in public spaces. Using ethnographic techniques in Barranquilla and Cali (Colombia), we suggest that the protection of sexuality is tangential to women's concerns when thinking about mobility, public space, and urban dimensions. We argue that putting women's sexuality at the center of public concerns by using space governance techniques helps reproduce a power scheme in which women lose because they are seen as childlike, vulnerable, and requiring protection. We defend the idea that we need to think spatially, but differently: using a legal geographies approach allows a novel tool to imagine refining policy approaches about vulnerable subjectivities in urban spaces. This paper reveals how space operates as a mechanism to produce identities associated with the mobility experiences of its inhabitants and related with class and gender axes. We argue that the emphasis on sexual harassment as the organizing vector of the interventions related to gender and the city reproduces gendered stereotypes of women and men and reinforces and legitimizes the role of the nation-state as patriarchal protector. Further, the emphasis on safety fails to recognize different ways in which women use their sexuality in cities, their agency, and their strategies for negotiating with governance techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]