The Geography Of Law: Landscape, Identity And Regulation (Oñati International Series In Law And Society)

Description

The essays in this collection relate notions of space and representations of interior and exterior spaces to concerns for individual identity and autonomy as these are framed by practices of governance or codified by law. They examine the manner in which imaginative frameworks forming an environment for human action are objectified through practices aimed at governing relations between people or conversely,the way in which legal codes and statutes rely upon there being a relationship between individuals and their surroundings. The Geography of Law brings together research from a range of disciplines to question how urban spaces, works of architecture and landscape, and representations of socio-legal ideas in texts, city plans and paintings, engage with the construction of identity, character and values, both historically and the present day. Essayists question the usefulness of space and regulation as categories of critical analysis, scrutinize familiar uses of these categories and invent new ones. This motivation behind the collection is based on an assumption that space and law carry moral worth and elicit moral considerations however variable their value might be.

Editors Biography

Rosemary Hunter FacSS is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and Founding Head of Law at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK. She is a feminist socio-legal scholar with particular interests in family law and family justice processes, judging and the judiciary, and access to justice. She has published widely on these topics in both Australia (where she began her academic career) and the UK. With Anne Barlow, she was a member of the ESRC-funded Mapping Paths to Family Justice project, which resulted in their prize-winning book, Mapping Paths to Family Justice: Resolving Family Disputes in Neoliberal Times (Barlow, Hunter, Smithson and Ewing, 2017). Rosemary has been the Academic Member of the Family Justice Council since 2016 and leads the Council’s Domestic Abuse Working Group. She is also a member of the Private Law Working Group and the Ministry of Justice’s Expert Panel on Harm in the Family Courts. She is a former Chair of the SLSA and a former Council member of JUSTICE.

David Nelken is Professor of Comparative and Transnational Law and past Vice-Dean for Research at King’s College London, UK. Widely published in sociology of law and in criminology, he has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the International Sociological Association, and the (USA) Law and Society Association. He has twice been a Trustee of the LSA and Vice-President of the RSCL.