Geography, law and legal struggles: which ways ahead?

The geopolitics of vulnerability: children's legal subjectivity, immigrant family detention and US immigration law and enforcement policy

“…Building on feminist political geography, this article conceptualizes immigration law as a site of struggle over space (Chouinard 1994) that 'link[s] international representation to the geographies of everyday life' (Dowler and Sharp 2001, 171). Emphasizing the embodiment of state policy-making (Mountz 2003(Mountz , 2004, feminist political geographers have argued for new empirical material and new conceptualizations of 'the political' (Marston 2000;Hyndman 2004b;Secor 2001;Staeheli, Kofman, and Peake 2004).…”

“…In contrast to these formal legal arguments, parents' descriptions of Hutto's daily life challenged the easy bounding of legal rights to children, forming a counter-narrative to all three 'official' legal arguments. Approaching the practice of immigration law as a polyvocal site of struggle (Chouinard 1994), I will argue that immigration litigation is a prescient site for feminist engagements with the geopolitics of mobility. I argue that these geostrategic discourses spatially constitute a governmental regime that maximizes precarity for 'them' while minimizing it for 'us' (Butler 2009), producing what I call a 'geopolitics of vulnerability'.…”

The Two Facets of Lesotho’s Urban Land Law and Implications for Planning

“…These earliest approaches assumed a benign view of law, in so far as they did not challenge the substantive basis of the law. Challenges to law only emerged from critical and interpretive geography in the 1980s and 1990s (Clark 1989a, b;Blomley 1989;Chouinard 1994;Economides 1996).…”

“…It is materialist in conception and focuses on power and power relations, the deployment of power through the judicial apparatus and people's experiences of the outcomes of the judicial process. Coupled with these materialist concerns are influences from feminist theories concerned with the power of law to construct social identities, such as gender and race, and to empower or marginalise and silence certain sections of society (Kobayashi 1990;Chouinard 1994).…”

Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices

“…Principal research themes of critical legal geographies include: the geographical specificity of law and legal knowledges, in terms of scales, domains, power and control over space (Cooper 1998;Kobayashi 1995); the exclusion of particular groups from particular spaces and the creation of spaces of resistance by the marginalised (Mitchell 1997); the processes and discourses that (re)construct and (re)shape people's legal identities and their capacities to enter into and act within the formal legal system (Chouinard 1998). A flurry of writings about legal geographies in the early 1990s has been followed by the steady development of a body of literature and academic perspectives on legal geographies (Blacksell et al 1991;Blomley 1992;Chouinard 1994;Clark 1986;Cooper 1998;Delany 1998;Ford 1994;Fyfe 1995;Kobayashi 1995). The majority of these 'legal geographies' have produced critiques of legal closure from within formal legal channels and spaces (the courts, the House of Parliament, the media etc.).…”