Event(ful) spaces of organised legal encounter: Reflections from a client consultation competition on domestic violence law in Cambodia

Abstract

This paper interrogates a client consultation competition that the author co‐organised on domestic violence law with staff and students from a higher education institution in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It hones in on the political interface that the event fashioned between the author, the student competitors, and the state. The paper demonstrates the value of cross‐pollinating social geographic work on events and encounter with legal‐oriented scholarship in the discipline on spaces and actors of law.

Legal geography I: Everyday law

“…This creates fascinating chances as it is still underexplored how law moves (Barr, 2016), how best to understand the legal liminality (Bloch, 2021), or how legal immobility relates to physical mobility (Braverman, 2016). Questions like these could benefit from what Brickell (2021) calls venturing and thinking creatively with the help of informal legal spaces.…”

“…Legal geographical scholarship has much potential to develop the understanding of subjectivities further, for instance in relation to the gendered and transgendered violence (e.g., Brickell, 2021) that has mostly been debated in specific contexts (e.g., in relation to Islamic law and Muslim feminism: Schenk, 2019Schenk, , 2020Schenk and Hasbullah, 2022) with less effort made to discuss the topic as an urgent legal geographical question. Exceptions include feminist geo-legality (Brickell and Cuomo, 2019) that has significantly advanced intersectional and relational approaches in the analyses of the complexities of law and gender.…”

Practising legal geography

“…The second part of the special section widens out from court spaces to think of the other sites enrolled within the making of law. Katherine Brickell (2021) opens this discussion with an examination of a client consultation competition on domestic violence held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This event saw law students and legal representatives deliberate on domestic violence cases, arguing questions of prosecutorial guidelines, admissibility of evidence, and burdens of proof.…”