Legal Geography Reading Lists

Selected works

The following work represents a variety of research agendas in legal geography and related sub-fields, and has been broken into three categories:

1. Signposts, anthologies and literature reviews on legal geography

2. Selected original works in legal geography

3. Selected original works in law-and-society studies

Signposts, anthologies and literature reviews on legal geography

• Bennett, L., and Layard, A. (2015). Legal Geography: Becoming Spatial Detectives. Geography Compass 9(7), pp. 406–422.

• Blomley, N., Delaney, D., & Ford, R. (2001). The Legal Geographies Reader: law, power, and space Oxford: Blackwell.

• Braverman, I., Blomley, N., Delaney, D., & Kedar, A. (2014). The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

• Delaney, D. (2015). Legal geography I: Constitutivities, complexities, and contingencies. Progress in Human Geography 39(1), pp. 96–102.

• Delaney, D. (2009). “Law and Law Enforcement” In Kitchin, R., & Thrift, N. (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, pp. 165–171. Amsterdam, Elsevier.

• Forest, Ben (ed.) (2000). Geography, Law, and Legal Geographies. Historical Geography 28 (Special Issue).

• Economides, K., Blacksell M., & Watkins, C. (1986). The Spatial Analysis of Legal Systems: Towards a Geography of Law? Journal of Law and Society 13(2), pp. 161–181.

• Holder, J. and Harrison, C. (eds.) (2002). Law and Geography (Volume 5, Current Legal Issues Series) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Selected original works in legal geography

• Attoh, K. A. (2011). What kind of right is the right to the city? Progress in Human Geography 35(5), pp. 669–685.

• Barkan, J. (2011). Law and the Geographic Analysis of Economic Globalization. Progress in Human Geography 35(5), pp. 589–607.

• Beckett, K., and Herbert, S. (2009). Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Benson, M. H. (2012). Mining sacred space: law’s enactment of competing ontologies in the American West. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 44(6), pp. 1443–1458.

• Blomley, N. (2008). “Simplification Is Complicated: Property, Nature, and the Rivers of Law.” Environment and Planning A 40(8), pp. 1825–1842.

• Blomley, N. (1994). Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: The Guilford Press.

• Butler, C. (2009). Critical legal studies and the politics of space. Social & legal studies 18(3), pp. 313–332.

• Burridge, A., Gill, N., Kocher, A., & Martin, L. (2017). Polymorphic borders. Territory, Politics, Governance 5(3), pp. 239–251.

• Carmalt, J. (2011). Human Rights, Care Ethics and Situated Universal Norms. Antipode 43(2), pp. 296–325.

• Carr, J., and Milstein, T. (2018). Keep Burning Coal or the Manatee Gets It: Rendering the Carbon Economy Invisible through Endangered Species Protection. Antipode 50(1), pp. 82–100.

• Coleman, M. (2008). Between Public Policy and Foreign Policy: U.S. Immigration Law Reform and the Undocumented Migrant. Urban Geography 29(1), 4–28.

• Coleman, M. (2012). Immigrant Il-Legality: Geopolitical and Legal Borders in the US, 1882–Present. Geopolitics 17(2), pp. 402–422.

• Delaney, D. (1998). Race, Place, and the Law, 1836-1948. Austin: University of Texas Press.

• Delaney, D. (2010). The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making: Nomospheric Investigations. New York: Routledge.

• Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Gregory, D. (2011). “Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison.” In Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (eds.), pp. 55–98. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

• Herbert, S. (1997). Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• Herbert, S., Derman, D., & Grobelski, T. (2013). The Regulation of Environmental Space. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 9(1), pp. 227–47.

• Jeffrey, A., & Jakala, M. (2014). The Hybrid Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(3), pp. 652–667.

• Howitt, R. (2001). Frontiers, Borders, Edges: Liminal Challenges to the Hegemony of Exclusion. Australian Geographical Studies 39(2), pp. 233–245.

• Martin, D. G., Scherr, A. W., & City, C. (2010). Making law, making place: lawyers and the production of space. Progress in Human Geography 34(2), pp. 175–192.

• Mitchell, D. (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press.

• Mountz, A. (2010). Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• Silvern, Steven E. (1999). Scales of Justice: Law, American Indian Treaty Rights and the Political Construction of Scale. Political Geography 18(6), pp. 639–68.

• Staeheli, L. A., Mitchell, D., & Nagel, C. R. (2009). Making Publics: Immigrants, Regimes of Publicity and Entry to ‘The Public.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(4), pp. 633–648.

Selected original works in law-and-society studies (beyond geography)

• Batlan, F. (2015). Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press.

• Bishara, F. A. (2017). A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean. New York: Cambridge University Press.

• Braverman, I. (2010). Hidden in plain view: Legal geography from a visual perspective. Law, culture and the humanities 7(2), pp. 173–186.

• Butler, C. and Mussawir, E. (eds.) (2018). Spaces of Justice: Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations. New York: Routledge.

• Engel, D. E. and Engel, J. S. (2010). Tort, Custom, and Karma: Globalization and Legal Consciousness in Thailand. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

• Ford, R. (1997). Law’s Territory: A history of jurisdiction. Michigan Law Review 97, pp. 843–930.

• McCann, M. (1991). Legal mobilization and social reform movements: Notes on theory and its application. Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 11, pp. 225–254.

• Merry, S. E. (2006). Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Oh, R. (2004). Re-Mapping Equal Protection Jurisprudence: A Legal Geography of Race and Affirmative Action. American University Law Review 53(6), pp. 1305–1360.

• Spade, D. (2015). Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Durham: Duke University Press.

• Valverde, M. (2015). Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance. New York: Routledge.