Legal geography investigates the co-constitutive relationship of people, place and law. This essay provides an overview of how the law and geography cross-disciplinary project emerged from a context of mutual curiosity and explores how legal practice, in all its discretionary and rule-bound variety, co-produces places through an attentiveness to, and sometimes an apparent dismissal of, spatiality. The essay notes the formative importance of studies on power and inequality within urban governance in this predominantly critical field. However, it also considers how the cross-discipline is increasingly embracing legal geographic scholarship from within cultural, material and post-human geographies. Adopting the metaphor of the 'spatial detective', the essay situates legal geography as a way of examining law's materialisation within space, considering the field's methods, core concepts and the potential directions in which they may evolve.In this article, we outline the trajectory of the cross-disciplinary endeavour that has come to be known as legal geography. We suggest that there is much to learn by both legal scholars and geographers becoming 'spatial detectives' -of learning, Sherlock Holmes-like, to search out the presence and absence of spatialities in legal practice and of law's traces and effects embedded within places. In doing so, our aim is to think broadly about legal geography and of the critical and other drivers of its detective work. By using the metaphor of becoming a detective, we aim to illustrate legal geography's emphasis on law's 'worlding' and on it, being both active and still, vocal and silent. To do this, we start at the scene of legal geography's emergence, and of an apparent discovery by scholars, of something chilling within the body of the law.

Through a case study based in Bristol, this article explores how the ‘law of place’ has transformed multiple heterogeneous city centre spaces into a single homogeneous and commodified privately owned retail site. Drawing on de Certeau, Lefebvre, and humanistic geographers including Tuan, the article explores how law facilitates spatial and temporal enclosure through conventional understandings of private property, relying on techniques of masterplanning, compulsory purchase, and stopping up highways. It suggests that the law of place draws on binary spatial and conceptual distinctions to apparently separate places from spaces, applying different legal rules either side of an often invisible boundary line. The article questions this legally facilitated spatial and conceptual enclosure, particularly as it restricts spatial practices within the public realm. It concludes by rejecting an urban ‘right to roam’ as insufficiently transformative, calling for a broader interpretation of Lefebvre's ‘right to the city’ instead.

This paper investigates how planning regulation constructs the local, encapsulating a locality and prioritising local decision making over regional and national scales. It draws on a case study of the regulation of multiple occupation to make three interrelated points. First, the analysis emphasises the plurality of ‘locals’ and the interrelationships between them. Secondly, the paper explains how the juridification of the local is required to make a locality legally visible. This operationalisation and construction of the local (legally, spatially and socially) must take place before the political logic of localism, the prioritisation of local decision making over other scales of governance, can take legal effect. Thirdly, the paper explains how, once the ‘local’ is legally constructed and can make decisions, this prioritisation of apparently neutral local expertise and knowledge can act to enclose the spatial and social with sometimes powerful exclusionary and regressive effects.

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