Logic, and Lewis Carroll, suppose that we should always “begin at the beginning”. In the case of Matteo Nicolini’s excellent new book Legal Geography: Comparative Law and the Production of Space, I might venture an alternative. Start at the end. What precedes, as I will shortly describe, is series of finely-argued chapters exploring the possibilities offered by a cross-disciplinary engagement between law and geography. The fashioning, in a sense, of a “legal geography” and, it might be added, a legal geographer. It is at the end, in a passionately argued conclusion, that Nicolini affirms the reason. Living in “time of ecological distress”, where the vectors of global commodification threaten a range of apocalyptic consequences, never has the need to reconceptualise the relation of law, territoriality and “spatial production” pressed harder. He imagines Percy Shelley’s “man”, last and first, in his poem Prometheus Unbound: “Passionless; no, yet free from guilt or pain”. The future of humanity is at stake and time is short.
Appraised of the urgency, we can return to the beginning. The introduction to Legal Geography advances the animating theme. Which is that “legal geography” is something more than a mere coincidence of disciplines, of law and geography. Nicolini identifies F.W. Maitland’s 1898 “Township and Borough” as a text which gestures in the necessary direction, defining “legal geography” as a “process of spatial production taking place in the legally relevant relationship between community and its territory”. An intriguing source, given its relative unfamiliarity (not least to this reviewer). After which comes a necessarily methodological chapter, in which Nicolini juggles the tensions that inhere to law as a regulatory as well as constitutive and performative concept. The chapter closes in the company of Thomas Kuhn, whose theory of the scientific paradigm is an evident influence on Nicolini’s work.
The chapters which comprise Part ii of Legal Geography introduce the reader to a variety of “spatial normativities”. A first revisits the presentation of legal geography, the design of territorial borders, land and sea, and their mapping. How, in essence, space becomes legally “meaningful”. Ironically perhaps, one of the most intriguing challenges arises with attempts to spatially normativise “space” itself. A similar challenge arises when it comes to mapping the sea, its borders especially. Nicolini identifies various examples from history, noting the importance of the practice during the “age” of Empire. A more recent resonance might be noted by anyone familiar with the Northern Ireland Protocol written into the UK’s post-Brexit agreement. Where to place the border that was supposed to exist “down the “middle” of the Irish sea”? A border of considerable contestation, which never existed anyway. All a bit “Alice in Wonderland” again.
The second chapter in Part ii uncovers in greater depth the “colonial underpinnings” of modern geography, the manufacturing of “imperial spatiality”, as geography moved from the “fabulous” to the “militant”. Mapping for money, and for God too. Nicolini teases out the evident affinities between crusading and imperial militancy. The third of this set of chapters continues the colonial theme, but focusses on the development of a countervailing “critical” legal geography, determined to interrogate the relation of law and “domination” in the prescribing of space. A necessary “stirring”, as Nicolini puts it, designed to disturb the complacencies of legal formalism which have characterised earlier accounts of comparative law and territoriality. Apposite, perhaps, given the fact that we today live in a world of seeming disturbance, in which the integrity of the nation-state is constantly assailed, not just by transnational globalisation, but by large scale demographic movements, and more visceral expressions of political and cultural terrorism.
The two chapters which comprise the third Part of the book take a rather more focussed look at a couple of “case” studies in legal geography. A first focusses on the role of language and “storytelling” in regulatory description of space. Here again, Nicolini’s critical leanings are evident, and persuasive. The boundaries which the legal geographer imposes are textual before they are territorial, and putting down these “cultural markers”, he makes critical decisions about belonging and “otherness”. Markers which, of course, commonly overlay, even contradict. Something which leads necessarily to the second chapter in this set, which explores the rationalising processes, and aspirations, of “federal” legal geography, and the attendant mechanisms deployed to accommodate cultural differences. A recurring process of “demarcation and reshuffling”.
A final chapter, which comprises, a distinct Part iv, revisits the idea of “de-territorialised legal geographies”, wondering if we are finally detaching ourselves from an obsession with territorialisation. To an evident extent, Nicolini here builds upon some of the ideas advanced in the third chapter of Part ii, digging a little deeper into some of the associated challenges of the global world, the idea of the “Buyosphere”, of virtual currencies and “alternative reality spaces”, and the various challenges which cut across traditional boundaries, that of climate change being only the most starkly apparent. What lies beyond the Anthropocene? What lies beyond this question is the powerful conclusion with which we started this review.
Legal Geography will, for obvious reasons, appeal to comparative and international lawyers, especially those with a closer interest in globalisation and associated environmental concerns. But it will also be of interest to legal philosophers and historians too, and indeed any who identify with what we might, very broadly, be termed critical legal thinking. The disciplinary reach is considerable, moving far beyond just law and geography. As a legal historian, I thoroughly enjoyed a journey that took me from the mappers of classical Rome to the framers of Danelaw and the decrees of a fifteenth century pope, before moving onto the cartographers of late imperial Britain and the challenges of digital mapping discovered in Google Maps. The critical theory, necessarily deep at times, is constantly leavened by such prescient examples, drawn from across the world and across history. It is for this reason that Legal Geographies can be recommended as a powerfully, indeed passionately, argued text of prospective interest to a wide audience of lawyers, geographers, and plenty more.
