Legal geography II: The possibilities and disruptions of place

Abstract

This second progress report addresses the understanding of place in legal geography, and asks how it resonates with the wider philosophies and conceptualizations of place. By taking four viewpoints to place – territory and location, legal signification, law on the move, and place agency – the report argues that place thinking can offer intellectual tools for overcoming territorial legal thinking, and for acknowledging the legal relevance of situations and places that fall outside of a sovereign legal system. There is also potential for refreshing the rather stagnant human geographical discussions on the concept of place more widely.

I Introduction

‘Place, as a factor that is present in law but often not fully seen, has not been recognized for its theoretical importance as a viewpoint from which to understand the functioning and implications of many areas of law’ (Kuykendall 2014: 757).

Kuykendall describes a restricted understanding of place in legal thinking. A similar kind of statement could almost be made about legal geography. This progress report argues that even though the relations between place and law have been debated in legal geography, there is still much to be done for place to be a central theoretical and conceptual focus of legal geography. Other key concepts of geography – space, landscape and territory – have been widely debated in relation to law: for instance, territories have been addressed as regards property relations (e.g. Blomley 2023); space in relation to the questions of justice, rights, power and inequalities (e.g. Mitchell 2020); and landscapes in relation to justice (e.g. Jones et al., 2024). The concept of place has been more absent and vague, although its significance in legal geographical thinking has been widely noted – especially as regards the lived, embodied, and mundane aspects of law, or when discussing the agency of place (e.g. Braverman et al., 2014; Bennett 2016; Bartel 2018; Bennett and Layard 2015; Delaney 2010; Graham 2011).

Likewise, the recent decades’ human geographical literature on place has circled around questions that are relevant for law, yet law itself has not been much addressed. Law’s importance for place has, still, been noted when arguing how place is a significant way to explore morality and social justice (Smith et al., 1998), or how places form a normative landscape that transmits what is right or appropriate (Cresswell 1996). Regarding place as ‘an important part of what it means to be human’ (Smith et al., 1998: 10), as ‘primal to human existence’ (Cresswell 2015: 55), or as including ‘natural attitude’ and ‘lifeworld’ (Buttimer 1976; Seamon 1980) comes close to ideas about the legal constitution of everyday life and the ‘hidden’ customs, norms, and laws that are taken for granted by those socialized into culture (Delaney 1998, 2010; Kanellopoulou et al. 2024).

It is time to address the places of law and ask: How and why does place matter in legal geographical scholarship? What can be found beyond the generic legal places? And What are the unexplored or underused potentials of place in legal geography? The first of my progress reports on legal geography dealt with everyday law as a significant part of the spatial ways of thinking law. This second progress report continues with the theme of everyday law – referring to a diverse set of legal agents and knowledges, and to both formal and informal parts of law (Kymäläinen 2024). The definition of legislation, thus, covers various legal norms from international and national laws and treaties to taken for granted customs, parallel laws and minority self-rule (Lindahl 2010). The focus on the everyday suits well the conceptions of place as lived, meaningful and embodied, or legal place as happening at micro-scalar contexts of bodies, communities and homes (Gorman 2025). Yet, place also extends intellectually in other directions – such as to the questions of movement and post-human agencies. In this report, I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to legal geography, in addition to which there is focus on the recent decades’ literature on place in human geography. Although the majority of place literature does not discuss law per se, it opens up insights into the possibilities of place thinking in legal geography. The report can, however, cover only a small share of relevant literature dealing with place.

Earlier progress reports on legal geography by David Delaney and Alex Jeffrey address the question of place to a degree. Jeffrey (2019) mentioned courts as places, whereas Delaney (2015) alluded to place in relation to the pervasiveness of law; law’s making and unmaking of places; the placelessness and dephysicalization of law; and the commonness of the generic understanding of place. Furthermore, Delaney (2017) remarked on the expansion of legal geographical analysis to a variety of places, including non-Western and under-represented worlds where place ‘matters very differently than it does in the places from which we write’ (p. 668). This progress report has a more focused emphasis on place, and differs from the predecessors also by widening discussion towards place literature beyond legal geography.

This report takes four approaches to place: First, place as territory and location, which sheds light on the predominant understanding of place as territory in doctrinal legal thinking, and on the debates on localization and law in place-making practices. Second, places of legal signification, which addresses legal geographical literature on meaning-making, and relates it to the humanistic readings of place. Third, place and law on the move, which discusses the movement of both laws and legal places. And fourth, place as agency, which sheds light on the post-humanist approaches to place relevant for law. The sections are not mutually exclusive as it is impossible to cage the literature into these categories. Thus, legal significance, for instance, moves along throughout the report since it is one of the main components of understanding place in legal geography.

II Place as territory and location

In the most common interpretation, legal places are understood as locations or generic places where law is manifested and lived – such as a nation-states, cities, neighbourhoods, offices, homes, streets, schools or bodies (Davies 2017; Delaney 2010). In doctrinal legal thinking, this is often combined with imagining law through the bounded physical territories of sovereign states (Kuykendall 2014; Kanellopoulou 2020; about the concept of territory: Delaney 2005; Blomley 2023). Law is considered to happen inside of the borders of the territory and bursting out when the states represent themselves in international contexts. The state, thus, forms a sphere of authority where people, laws, institutions and disputes come together and form ‘the legally relevant place’ where the power of law applies (Kanellopoulou 2020: 369).

While the state-based territorial reading of law is linked with nationalism, postnationalism offers a wider perspective with regional, global and other overlapping legal orders diversifying the conception of legal place. De-territorialization does not mean de-localization, which – as Hans Lindahl (2010) argues – would depoliticize the conception of legal orders, hiding how they make a division between the inside where one is included, and an outside or a strange place where one is excluded (see also Cresswell 1996).

Many deficiencies have been identified in the territorial interpretations of law: Firstly, they fail to recognize how law does not stay the same even inside the territory but transforms according to contexts (e.g. Davies 2017; Kuykendall 2014). Secondly, they dismiss questions – such as justice and injustice – that fall outside of a sovereign legal system but are still a part of the legal continuum where places and laws modify each other. And thirdly, these views struggle when trying to address places that have ambiguous legal status – such as Antarctica, urban squats (Kanellopoulou 2020: 372), or sites having place-based orders and parallel, informal laws (Schenk 2020). As these and many other discussions suggest, incorporating place more profoundly into legal debates might help overcome some of the limitations of the territorial focus and contest abstract, dematerialized and dephysicalized readings of law (e.g. Davies 2017; Kuykendall 2014).

A more holistic and pragmatic approach to the localization of law has been provided by scholars exploring law in place-making practices (e.g. Bennett 2016; Kanellopoulou et al. 2024; Layard 2010, 2021). Luke Bennett has written about the process of localization, in which law adjusts and becomes incorporated into place, and into its practices, customs and material environment. The localization of law alters places by pragmatic actions such as directing resources (e.g. taxes), or by creating processes that lead to the building of physical structures (e.g. fences, buildings and traffic routes). Being inspired by the material turn and Latourian thinking, Bennett argues that one of the tasks of legal geographers is to ‘trace how the law is being used by human actors to allow, recognize and reproduce distinct thing- and place-types’ (Bennett 2016: 185). He notes that places do not always refer to singularity, but also to categoric place-forms (see also Layard 2021) such as factories, pubs and sidewalks that are particularized when they become affected by both local and translocal factors (see nomic settings that confer significance onto actions, relations and situations: Delaney 2010). It is also noteworthy how some place-forms that serve as legal categories, have changed: for instance, the conceptions of the workplace and the associated legal responsibilities have changed due to the increased remote work (Kuykendall 2014). All in all, it is easy to agree with Bennett (2021: 12) who argues that ‘it is precisely those situations of law’s seemingly marginal or unexpectedly mundane presence within place-forming that need exploring and accounting for in legal geography’.

III Places of legal signification

It has been widely acknowledged how places are inscribed with legal significance, how law and its practices build values into places (Bennett and Layard 2015; Braverman et al., 2014; Delaney 2010), and how law creates senses of place that remain even after the laws are abolished (de Villiers 2017; Valverde 2012). Legal signification can be various: as Delaney (2010) notes, legal meanings are sometimes materially attached to the borders of social spaces with the prohibition signs, but most often legal meanings are tacit and become more visible only under exceptional circumstances.

It is, however, surprising how infrequently the question of legal signification has been related to geographical debates on meaningful, lived places. Such places were widely addressed by humanistic geographers in the 1970s, and later on, the discussions expanded to other strands of geography. It is, likewise, astonishing, how narrowly the geographical research on place has addressed the question of law, even as arguments have circled around law – related, for instance, to values, customs and senses of property (e.g. Malpas 1999; Relph 1976; Tuan 1974, 1977).

There, thus, remain many underexplored questions regarding the relationships between legal and humanistic geographical notions of the signification of place. Interesting insights could be gained by exploring, for instance, how debates on the weakening of the distinctiveness of places – or placelessness (Relph 1976) – relate to research on the replacement of local and customary laws in places by formal and homogenous laws (Blomley 1994). Or by asking how law’s role in turning spaces to places by giving them meaning (de Villiers 2017; Shoemaker 2024) resembles the humanistic definitions of the differences between space and place (Tuan 1977). And how do the discussions on the law’s placement inside of bounded territories relate to the notions of the inside-outside divisions addressed in place literature (Cresswell 1996; Relph 1976)? Or how could the experiential meanings of law in places (Delaney 1998) connect more firmly to the understanding of place as integral to the possibility of experience (Malpas 1999) or as a profound centre of human experience (Relph 1976)?

In humanistic geography, place was often discussed in terms of safety, identity and rest (e.g. Relph 1976), although some scholars also noted how the relationship with places can be unpleasant, and places can be regarded as ‘oppressive and imprisoning’ (Relph 1976: 41). The widely adopted romantic conception of place was later on criticized especially by feminist scholars for being masculinist and ignoring the questions of power, inequality, the division of labour, and restricted social relations. It was also noted that the assumed connection of place and community was illusory in the case of many places. For many women, home was a place of work, and could not be associated to the conflict-free and safe resting place (e.g. Massey 1994, 1995; McDowell 1997; Rose 1993). Doreen Massey (1995), for instance, noted that it was probably those who were able to leave, who had the most romantic views about the place. In legal geographical discussions, both these sides of place also exist: on the one hand, place-based laws and the significance of local knowledge and experiences are stressed, yet it is noted how places can mean a lack of rights, or the power to banish (Kuykendall 2014: 767). Similarly, research has emphasized how the lived experiences of law need to address violence and living with precarity (e.g. Brickell and Cuomo 2019; Gorman 2025), while increasing understanding of how legal relations reproduce structural inequalities (Gorman 2025).

IV Place and law on the move

Place has been associated with permanence and stability: it has been characterized as a pause that stops the movement and allows belonging to a place (Tuan 1977), or as a permanence created by human beings to create a locus of social power or to advance cultural and moral meanings (Harvey 1996). Furthermore, the metaphors of place – such as ‘out of place’, ‘our place’, ‘holding a place’, ‘things in their proper place’ (Harvey 1996; Kuykendall 2014) – support the view of place as definable, stable and occupied. Still, the focus on stability and pause tells only a part of the story. Relph (1976), for instance, reminded us that location and position were not necessary or sufficient conditions for place, but also nomadism or other types of mobility included possibilities for place attachment. David Seamon’s (1980: 161) place-ballet, for its part, expanded the conception of existential insideness and how places form in the dynamism of people’s movements. Massey’s (1991, 1994) notion of the global sense of place, as well as the idea of the identity of place as constituted in social interrelations that expand beyond the place itself, opened up new possibilities for overcoming the conceptions of place as bounded and authentic. Furthermore, the conceptualizations of place in terms of belonging instead of being (e.g. Kymäläinen 2005; Lukermann 1964; Pred 1984) suggested how places are not stable but rather created in processes and by doing. And over the past two decades, mobility has become acknowledged as a fundamental part of the experiences of place (Cresswell 2006).

Some of today’s most interesting and timely legal geographical discussions on places are related to movement and mobility. I will introduce some of this research from the perspectives of passing through legal places; taking legal place along; creating and transforming law by moving bodies; and legal places that come and go.

If it is thought that laws exist in bounded places – like in the territorial conception of law – there is an assumption that when people move, they pass through legal places. As Delaney (1998) describes, we move through legal places, and our conception of the rights and duties that we or others have, are related to the changing locations. While moving through places, some of these rights and responsibilities remain, and some change. In their study concerning court-imposed territorial restrictions, Marie-Eve Sylvestre, Nicholas Blomley and Céline Bellot (2019) criticize the way in which these restrictions create distinctive legal zones inside the areas that people use in their daily lives. A person may not be allowed to access a certain area, or fines might be doubled for crimes committed inside of the zone. Sylvestre, Blomley and Bellot regard this kind of legal zoning problematic as it ignores that people whom these restrictions mostly concern, suffer from ‘addiction, poverty, and radically constrained choices’ (p. 34–35), and do not, thus, move from one legal place to another as rational actors. Legal thinking and the everyday can be incommensurate: it is assumed that people move and act according to the logic of the average, rational citizen, although, in reality, they might be reliant on services located in the prohibited area, or might not be capable of rational action.

The viewpoint of taking legal place along leans, for instance, on Sarah Keenan’s (2015) writings on how legal spaces move with people, suggesting that the laws specific to places are not separate from people inhabiting or visiting the places and can, thus, travel with these people. Bennett (2016: 190), as well, writes about translocalization where ‘things and people act as carriers – vectors of law – seeding places with ideas from elsewhere’, while Stefano Bloch (2021) shows that cars not only transport bodies but also form liminal legal places. Lindahl (2010: 36), for his part, writes about the distribution of ‘ought-places’ where ‘behavior ought or ought not to take place’. He argues that ought-places do not need fixed territories, but rather communities seek places for them. For instance, a multinational corporation forms a distribution of ought-places, inside of which certain rules apply, and define who has access to these places and what kinds of activities are allowed in them. Likewise, von Benda-Beckmann & von Benda-Beckmann (2014) note that moving people lead to moving legal places – whether the movement is a result of environmental problems, displacement, or some other causes.

Furthermore, law and places can be created and transformed by moving bodies. Olivia Barr (2016) argues that in order to think where the place of common law is, attention should be paid to movement. She argues that common law moves, and that practices like walking and burial are activities that make legal places. Movement means practicing common law and participating in the formation of legal relations. What is interesting here is not only the moving, legal practices but also how common law overlaps and relates with the other laws of its new places (see also Godden 2020; Kanellopoulou et al. 2024).

Or, as von Benda-Beckmann & von Benda-Beckmann (2014) argue, legal places come and go: they move and change. The authors provide an example of moving rivers that change their course, and how the land that emerges as a result changes the contours of individual property and requires negotiation by land owners. This example recalls the work of the pioneering legal geographer Michael Jones (1977) whose early research explored how human beings, legal systems and local customs responded to the changes resulting from land uplift due to isostatic rebound in Scandinavia.

V Places as legal agents

As hinted at in the river example above, another timely discussion on places in legal geography relates closely to environmental issues and the agency of place. Some of that literature is known as post-human legal geographies and directs attention to the agency of place (e.g. Bartel 2018; Bartel and Graham 2023; Graham 2021; Loivaranta 2019). Robyn Bartel (2018), for instance, emphasizes the importance of valuing place law and understanding how places ‘speak’. Places should, thus, be regarded as legal agents that regulate and create law, and actively shape norms, laws and legal practices. Tikli Loivaranta’s (2019) study similarly discusses the agency of place and customary lawscapes in the sacred places of an Indigenous community. Many other scholars have debated place agency in relation to the definitions of property and their effects on environmental change. These scholars have, especially, addressed the placelessness of property; how it is detached from place and its physical realities, as well as from the relations of people, species and ecosystems (Byer 2023).

Some of these studies relate property’s placelessness to environmental change or the questions of sustainability. Bartel and Graham (2023) state that the studies on place agency have possibilities to advance a shift towards more sustainable agricultural practices, as well as to renew the legal models of private ownership. The authors report that farmers’ narratives revealed the negative effects of the abstract thinking that had been adopted in land use decision-making. Improving the situation would require acknowledging place agency and place law; how laws should be generated by geographical conditions, or how the decisions concerning land use should be affected by local knowledge and place attachment.

Some scholars argue that one of the main problems in property thinking is related to dephysicalised property. This means that property is seen as a relation between people, whereas place and the questions of materiality remain irrelevant (Graham 2011, 2021). People are seen as active agents in property relationships, whereas ‘things’ remain passive. Land is seen as a commodity and appreciated due to its instrumentalist value that legitimizes the current modes of production and consumption (see also Shoemaker 2024). It is, therefore, difficult to react to the local environmental conditions or crises that would require including place more firmly in the interpretation of property relations. Including the question of place would, thus, be disruptive to relations of property (Graham 2011). Rather similarly, Jessica A. Shoemaker (2024) directs attention to the possibilities of place in the redefinitions of property. She notes that since the boundaries of property are artificial, owners’ choices tend to have ‘spillover effects’ or ‘secondary impacts’ outside of those legal lines (p. 825). The spillover effects’ impact on various social factors can be both positive and negative, and much effort is needed to manage these effects. Shoemaker argues that paying more attention to the meanings of place would enhance the understanding of property’s significance for both owners and nonowners. This would, furthermore, help in constructing a more humane and sustainable conception of property.

VI Conclusions

This progress report has presented a selection of studies that have advanced the thinking about place as a key concept in legal geography. Place has been widely discussed in legal geography in terms of generic places (for instance, when acknowledging the role of states and cities in law-making), or as specific locations where certain laws are practiced. These approaches are important as regards their ability to show the formation and functioning of official laws in places, as well as laws’ daily effects and realization at different contexts and geographical scales. At the same time, understanding place in generic or locational terms shows only a small share of the potential that the concept of place has in developing legal geographical thinking.

Currently, the understanding of place is in the progress of diversifying in legal geography. Intriguing developments can be identified especially regarding the questions of significance, movement and agency. Firstly, targeting attention to the meanings and significance of legal places widens the distant and official conceptions of law. The meanings of place do not follow artificial legal lines, and they extend beyond administrative places (e.g. cities, neighbourhoods or plots), being also present in the micro-scale realization of laws. Therefore, these meanings should be more commonly seen as significant factors in legal relations: they can, for instance, motivate people to negotiate over legal territories, or they can function more unobtrusively in tacit daily practices. Emphasizing meanings, however, does not mean dwelling on subjective feelings and nostalgia, but rather acknowledging the law-transforming potential of everyday practices, daily uses of land or marginal situations that do their share in transforming small-scale legal orders.

Secondly, places and their laws travel with humans and non-humans. This notion questions the assumption of laws being powerful only in fixed locations and territories. The movement of law resulting from migration, moving vehicles, moving herds, multinational companies or digitalization are just a tip of the iceberg, implying the urgency to re-think and re-conceptualize the relations between law and place in more mobile terms. One might wonder why, therefore, it is valuable to tackle legal movement with the concept of place instead of the concept of space that has more often been associated with movement. One reason for that is the capability of place to provide understanding not only of the legal movements and their spatial effects but also of their legal meanings and particularities.

Thirdly, debates on place agency have diversified the understanding of law beyond seeing people as dominant agents and land as a commodity. Whether the question is about the sacred forests, land uplifting, changing meanders, floods or wildfires, they all show the power of place in creating and shaping laws. This also suggests how detached the official legal reasoning can be from place-specific geographical conditions and local knowledge.

In addition to providing fresh thoughts and new theoretical paths, legal geographical thinking on place has potential to disrupt some taken-for-granted conceptions of law and to diversify the conception of law-creating and law-transforming powers. These disruptions can offer intellectual tools for overcoming both the territorial and official legal thinking, and the restrictions that limit the understanding of situations or places that have ambiguous legal status or fall outside of a sovereign legal system. Legal geographical working can also have wider influence: thinking of law with the multifaceted philosophical and theoretical literature on place not only advances legal geographical thinking but also includes possibilities for refreshing the rather stagnant debates on place more widely in human geography.