Special issue: legal geography/ies

Abstract

The nine articles comprising this special issue of Geographical Research bring together a diverse range of scholarship by Australian legal geographers and combine the products of two initiatives: an innovative workshop at the University of New England and the Inaugural Australian Legal Geography Symposium at the University of Technology Sydney (with thanks to the generous support of the Institute of Australian Geographers, the University of New England, and the University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Law). The workshop and symposium invited researchers to contribute their work in a slightly unconventional way – rather than presentations followed by questions and answers, these gatherings were based on the prior submission of ideas or works in progress in order to accelerate iterative revisions of drafts through collegial dialogue and sometimes also contestation. The outcome was a far richer collection of pieces that genuinely reflect the feedback and contributions of colleagues working on different topics but using the shared methodology of legal geography. Consequently, you will find in this issue articles connected neither spatially nor temporally but in their intellectual approach to their topics. So what is this approach? What does legal geography offer, as a methodology, to law and geography as separate and distinct disciplines? Legal geography is a critical theoretical approach to questions at, and about, the intersection of laws and geographies. By law, we include positive law and policy, regulation and regulatory frameworks, and the broader contexts of governance, normative discourse and power. By geography, we include scale, space, place, environment, climate, ecology, and the more-than-human. The articles here traverse all these aspects of law and geography. Legal geography explores various aspects of the many ways in which law and geography are co-constitutive and co-destructive by providing the conditions for and limits to changes to each other; hence, our use of the plural forms laws and geographies. In the piece that opens this special issue, Robyn Bartel canvasses how explorations in legal geography could build on geography's rich history in policy and application, and, through identifying some of the structural and systemic barriers that may currently stymy current endeavours, the paper provides pathways toward more fruitful engagements. In ‘Shall we tell the Minister?’ Robert Gale explores the research-policy nexus question further by describing the promises and challenges of, and conditions for, policy-relevant scholarship in geography. Gale invites us to consider place as a geographic institution and heralds the potential of scale as a policy-relevant assessment criterion. Josephine Gillespie's work into tenure and property in Cambodia establishes how a local legal lens is essential to accommodate geographical differences across space and time and between cultures and settings. And we (Bartel and Graham) explore one application in the area of native vegetation law reform in New South Wales and specifically how place attachment and place-care behaviours may be recognised and supported within, rather than in spite of, existing private property relationships. As demonstrated in Emily O'Gorman's piece, legal geography is neither ahistorical nor apolitical. Her account of the ways in which animals and their environments co-constitute another tragic chapter in the legal geography of the Coorong, South Australia, is presented through a critical analysis of the pelican slaughter of 1911. Tayanah O'Donnell presents a timely legal geographical analysis of coastal climate change litigation. O'Donnell contends that because litigation is central to the truth-claims of legal discourse, disputes over the regulation of coastal erosion illustrate clearly the mutual relationship between people and place and specifically the co-disruption of established legal categories and of the coast itself arising out of this litigation. Jason Prior and Penny Crofts have woven a tapestry of legal philosophy, cultural geography, and political theory in their exceptional analysis of the idea and enactment of sanctuary. Taking Sydney's Medically Supervised Injecting Centre as their case study, Prior and Crofts connect the symbolic and legal terrain of sanctuary to its lived and material existence. They contend that the ancient concept of sanctuary continues to provide not a ‘lawless space’ but an alternative regulatory approach that is a testament to the progressive properties of legal pluralism. Daniel Robinson and Miranda Forsyth explore the relationship between people, place, law, and the more-than-human in Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, and Samoa through tracing the change to, and implementation of laws created to protect traditional knowledge at different scales and jurisdictions, by different legal cultures and at different moments throughout multiple histories of colonisation. Their article traces also the effects of these legal changes on people, place, and nature, and advocating for the expansion of legal pluralism to recognise and protect Indigenous people's knowledge of places and plants. In ‘Catch 22: Wetlands Protection and Fishing for Survival’, Josephine Gillespie again argues powerfully for the need to adopt a legal geographical approach, in this case to protect Cambodian lakescapes and their wetland ecologies. Gillespie demonstrates that a methodology separating people from place fails to achieve an effective and therefore enduring legal response because it is scale-insensitive with a devastating paradoxical outcome that protects neither the wetland ecologies nor the communities depending on their protection. …offers the best route to explicate the grounded, embodied effects of law in the constitution of the world, and to challenge the impression that law aspires to dematerialization, that it seeks to marginalize specificity (i.e. local distinctiveness) and that law seeks to erase spatiality, or, indeed ever could. None declared.