Practising legal geography

Abstract

Legal geography is experiencing a “practice turn.” Understanding the material, spatial, and embodied characteristics of law is illuminating hitherto obscured experiences of justice, injustice, and political practice. It is contributions from scholars at the forefront of these concerns, from geography and cognate disciplines, that comprise the papers in the Practising legal geography special section. Across seven papers we are seeking to explore the ways in which a focus on practice can deepen our understanding of the methods and praxis of legal geography. Following an outline of its conceptual underpinnings and origins of the research, we give a short account of each of the papers and point to areas of future research for which they provide provocation. Practice emerges as much more than empirical detail – it is a perspective through which we can trace the operation of power and struggle in the making of law.

Progressive and critical legal geography scholarship

“…Moreover, unpacking the agency exercised by people, places, and the material and more‐than‐human all need more legal geography research. Challenges lie ahead to extend our scholarship to embrace the practice turn (Brickell et al, 2021), uncover more about legal pluralism/s (Robinson & Graham, 2018), and enhance theorising in legal geography (Chiodelli & Morpurgo, 2022). Colleagues within our region and across the globe are calling for and making inroads into a socially progressive research agenda and Australian legal geography scholarship, such as evinced in these papers, is well‐placed to lead the charge.…”

Legal and cultural geographies of displacement: home un making through material belongings

“…Bringing the socio-legal and cultural geographies of material belongings into dialogue provokes questions about the precarious politics (Delaney, 2010) and political potential (Brickell et al, 2021) that lie in home unmaking. It challenges legal abstractions about what counts as property and who matters as a propertied subject (Blomley, 2004;Roy, 2017).…”

“…Inspired by debates calling for a closer dialogue between cultural and legal geographies (Braverman et al, 2014;Brickell, 2020;Brickell et al, 2021), our approach combines a material culture lens (Miller, 2010) focused on the significance of objects in the everyday performance of home and belonging, with a socio-legal lens, centred on the norms and legal practices which govern tenants' belongings (Blomley et al, 2020;Dozier, 2019).…”

Introduction to Courtroom Ethnography

“…These approaches use ethnographies to study the materialities of courts (Jeffrey 2019), including courthouse buildings, courtroom architecture, and furniture design (Kumar 2017, Resnik andEdward 2011;Rowden 2011;Klosterkamp 2021) along with design-induced courtroom atmospheres (Bens 2018;Klosterkamp 2022) and the associated sensory experiences (Flower 2020(Flower , 2021. These courtroom material environments and atmospheres at place also expand and deepen our insights of the courtroom itself, its national security framings, threat perceptions, aims and possibilities for seeking justice, by bridging the local and national to more global notions of the and its different shapes and objectives (Burridge and Gill 2016;Brickell, Jeffrey and McConnell 2021;Brickell and Cuomo 2019;Faria et al 2020;Flower 2021;Jeffrey 2020;Klosterkamp 2022b;Ramirez et al 2021). Such geopolitical aspects are crucial for understanding legal spheres because, as Mulcahy (2011: 1) writes that "the environment in which the trial takes place can be seen as a physical expression of our relationship with the ideals of justice".…”