Introduction to the concept of territory as it applies to law. Accessible to students. Of interest to those working in the areas of sociolegal studies, geography, urban studies and politics.

The Expanding Spaces of Law presents readers with cutting-edge scholarship in legal geography. An invaluable resource for those new to this line of scholarship, the book also pushes the boundaries of legal geography, reinvigorating previous modes of inquiry and investigating new directions. It guides scholars interested in the law-space-power nexus to underexplored empirical sites and to novel theoretical and disciplinary resources. Finally, The Expanding Spaces of Law asks readers to think about the temporality and dynamism of legal spaces.

"The Expanding Spaces of Law" presents readers with cutting-edge scholarship in legal geography. An invaluable resource for those new to this line of scholarship, the book also pushes the boundaries of legal geography, reinvigorating previous modes of inquiry and investigating new directions. It guides scholars interested in the law-space-power nexus to underexplored empirical sites and to novel theoretical and disciplinary resources. Finally, "The Expanding Spaces of Law" asks readers to think about the temporality and dynamism of legal spaces.

Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow documents a powerful and under-researched form of urban governance that focuses on pedestrian flow. This logic, which Nicholas Blomley terms 'pedestrianism', values public space not in terms of its aesthetic merits, or its success in promoting public citizenship and democracy. Rather, the function of the sidewalk is understood to be the promotion and facilitation of pedestrian flow and circulation, predicated on the appropriate arrangement of people and objects. This remarkably pervasive yet overlooked logic shapes the ways in which public space is regulated, conceived of, and argued about. Rights of Passage shows how the sidewalk is literally produced, encoded, rendered legible and operational with reference to a dense array of codes, diagrams, specifications, academic and professional networks, engineering rubrics, regulation and case law - all in the name of unfettered circulation.

Although a powerful form of governance, pedestrianism tends to be obscured by grander and more visible forms of urban regulation. The rationality at work here may appear commonplace; but, precisely because it is uncontroversial, pedestrianism is able to operate below the academic and political radar. Complicating the prevailing tendency to focus on the socially directive nature of public space regulation, Blomley reveals the particular ways in which pedestrianism deactivates rights-based claims to public space.

This timely Reader brings together, for the first time, key writings on the relationship between law and geography. In so doing, it has fostered the creation of an intellectual forum for scholars and students in related disciplines, who have - until now - been working in parallel, rather than in tandem. Although a recent area of study, the intersection between these fields is becoming increasingly important with the recognition that space is socially produced and that it is riddled with power relations.

The chapters in this Reader are organized around geographic scale - local, national, global - and each section includes an introductory essay contextualizing the selections and explaining their contribution. The topics covered include public space, local racisms, property and the city, environmental regulation, state formation and decentralization and international-global legalities. A comprehensive introduction reviews the current state of the field.

Representing some of the most provocative and interesting approaches to law and geography by an interdisciplinary group of acclaimed contributors, "Legal Geographies Reader" will serve as an important reference source to this expanding field.

How is the legal conception of 'property' working to eradicate the global urban commons? Contemporary capitalism has advanced this process by producing rampant gentrification, socio-spatial stratification, and racial inequality. In Unsettling the City, Nicholas Blomley shows how the concept of 'property' helps to generate and underwrite these pervasive urban processes. But they are not uncontested. Showing how conflicting concepts of property are implicated in a host of social struggles in the contemporary city, he begins his study with the Pacific Northwest. From this base, Blomley moves to Pacific Rim cities in general, looking at gentrification, urban land, and postcolonialism in the Western US, Australia, and Western Canada - areas where one can see the stark collision between Western, neoliberal notions of property and the more egalitarian, communal view espoused by recently displaced (yet still present) native cultures.

Contents:
Acknowledgements Preface 1. Welcome to the Hotel California 2. Property and the Landscapes of Gentrification 3. The Moralities of Land 4. Land and the Postcolonial City 5. Back to the Land

Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow documents a powerful and under-researched form of urban governance that focuses on pedestrian flow. This logic, which Nicholas Blomley terms 'pedestrianism', values public space not in terms of its aesthetic merits, or its success in promoting public citizenship and democracy. Rather, the function of the sidewalk is understood to be the promotion and facilitation of pedestrian flow and circulation, predicated on the appropriate arrangement of people and objects. This remarkably pervasive yet overlooked logic shapes the ways in which public space is regulated, conceived of, and argued about. Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow shows how the sidewalk is literally produced, encoded, rendered legible and operational with reference to a dense array of codes, diagrams, specifications, academic and professional networks, engineering rubrics, regulation and case law -- all in the name of unfettered circulation. Although a powerful form of governance, pedestrianism tends to be obscured by grander and more visible forms of urban regulation. The rationality at work here may appear commonplace; but, precisely because it is uncontroversial, pedestrianism is able to operate below the academic and political radar. Complicating the prevailing tendency to focus on the socially directive nature of public space regulation, Blomley reveals the particular ways in which pedestrianism deactivates rights-based claims to public space.

A Landscape of Conflict? Rural Fortifications in the Argolid (400-146 BC) is the first systematic study of Late Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications in the territories of ancient Argos and the city-states of the Argolic Akte (northeastern Peloponnese). Based on one of the largest regional corpora of Greek fortified sites to date, the volume investigates the function of rural fortifications by placing them in the context of their surrounding landscape. This approach - combining 'traditional' methods of ancient history and landscape archaeology with GIS-based data analyses - helps to readdress the long-standing tension between 'military-strategic' and 'non-military' research agendas in Greek fortification studies, and highlights that Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications are neither a priori fortified farmsteads nor parts of military-strategic networks of territorial defence. Instead, rural fortifications emerge in this monograph as multifunctional and multifaceted sites, which open a new window into different forms of 'formal' and 'informal' conflict in the ancient countryside and bear witness to a remarkable degree of local motivation and agency. The study thus demonstrates how ancient fortifications can provide an unexpected and so far much underappreciated opportunity for writing local or regional Greek histories - political and military as well as social and economic - from archaeological sources.

In Red Zones, Marie-Eve Sylvestre, Nicholas Blomley, and Celine Bellot examine the court-imposed territorial restrictions and other bail and sentencing conditions that are increasingly issued in the context of criminal proceedings. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with legal actors in the criminal justice system, as well as those who have been subjected to court surveillance, the authors demonstrate the devastating impact these restrictions have on the marginalized populations - the homeless, drug users, sex workers and protesters - who depend on public spaces. On a broader level, the authors show how red zones, unlike better publicized forms of spatial regulation such as legislation or policing strategies, create a form of legal territorialization that threatens to invert traditional expectations of justice and reshape our understanding of criminal law and punishment.

In Red Zones, Marie-Eve Sylvestre, Nicholas Blomley, and Celine Bellot examine the court-imposed territorial restrictions and other bail and sentencing conditions that are increasingly issued in the context of criminal proceedings. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with legal actors in the criminal justice system, as well as those who have been subjected to court surveillance, the authors demonstrate the devastating impact these restrictions have on the marginalized populations - the homeless, drug users, sex workers and protesters - who depend on public spaces. On a broader level, the authors show how red zones, unlike better publicized forms of spatial regulation such as legislation or policing strategies, create a form of legal territorialization that threatens to invert traditional expectations of justice and reshape our understanding of criminal law and punishment.