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.