The following is cross-posted from Legal Lacuna.

The latest issue of Law, Culture, and the Humanities contains several articles relating to legal geography, space, and territorialization. Law joins, of course, a variety of other disciplines in taking this “spatial turn.”

Here are the titles and abstracts:

“Law’s Spatial Turn: Geography, Justice and a Certain Fear of Space” by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Abstract: This is a critical reading of the current literature on law and geography. The article argues that the literature is characterized by an undertheorization of the concept of space. The focus is either on the specific geography of law in the form of jurisdiction, or as a simple terminological innovation. Instead, the article suggests that law’s spatial turn ought to consider space as a singular parameter to the hitherto legal preoccupation with time, history and waiting. This forces law into dealing with a new, peculiarly spatial kind of uncertainty in terms of simultaneity, disorientation, materiality and exclusionary corporeal emplacement. The main area in which this undertheorization forcefully manifests itself is that of spatial justice. Despite its critical potential, the concept has been reduced by the majority of the relevant literature into another version of social, distributive or regional justice. On the contrary, if the peculiar characteristics of space are to be taken into account, a concept of justice will have to be rethought on a much more fundamental level than that.

“Cuts, Flows, and the Geographies of Property” by Nicholas Blomley

Abstract: How is property geographical? The making of liberal property, I argue, relies upon a topographical logic, premised on the production of bounded, coherent spaces, through which the individuated subjects and objects of property can be rendered legible. Such a spatialization helps sustain the territorialization of property, in which the government of space becomes a means for the enactment of property. The production of such spaces requires conscious ‘cuts’ in the processual networks through which social spaces are produced. As such, property should be seen as a conditional achievement, ever threatened by unwanted relationality and boundary crossing. I draw from Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River to explore property’s spaces, and their ambivalent ethical and practical work.

“The Constituent Power of Architecture” by Lior Barshak

Abstract: The claim that law is grounded in representations of authority hardly requires justification. The article outlines one view of the power of representations of authority to subject society to the law, and attempts to shed light on the social significance of architecture as a medium of such representation. I will argue that representation sets apart the realms of the living and the dead while sustaining a complex relationship between the two realms. It houses the dead in a separate realm where they exercise authority over the living. Monumental architecture founds the authority of law, and the entire realm inhabited by the living, by relegating the dead to a separate sphere where they assume the position of ancestral lawgivers. Architecture can separate the living from the dead and anchor the rule of law by virtue of its claims to perpetuity and aesthetic form.

“‘Passing through the Mirror’: Dead Man, Legal Pluralism and the De-territorialization of the West” by Ruth M. Buchanan

Abstract: The failures of Western law in its encounter with indigenous legal orders have been well documented, but alternative modes of negotiating the encounter remain under-explored in legal scholarship.The present article addresses this lacuna. It proceeds from the premise that the journey towards a different conceptualization of law might be fruitfully re-routed through the affect-laden realm of embodied experience—the experience of watching the subversive anti-western film Dead Man. Section II explains and develops a Deleuzian approach to law and film which involves thinking about film as ‘‘event.’’ Section III considers Dead Man’s relation to the western genre and its implications for how we think about law’s founding on the frontier. Finally, the article explores the concept of ‘‘becoming’’ through a consideration of the relationship between the onscreen journey of the character Bill Blake and the radical worldview of his poetic namesake.

“Law and the Foucauldian Wild West in Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate” by Diana Young

Abstract: Classic western films often conceive of the west as existing in a legal void, where the central conflict is a binary one between lawlessness and legalization. The law is a monolith, and the legalization process is linear—a narrative of the west’s inexorable evolution toward a modern state governed by the rule of law. Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate presents a more postmodernist, pluralist conception. There is no grand narrative of legalization; the film envisages a discourse of justice emerging from the interaction of a variety of discourses, and which appears to be a unity only from the vantage point of history.