A New Book on Law's "Spatial Turn": Spaces of Justice, Edited by Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir

Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir, both of the Griffith Law School, are editing Spaces of Justice: Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations (Routledge, 2017). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

This collection is inspired by the transdisciplinary possibilities posed by the connections between space and justice. Drawing on a variety of theoretical influences that include Henri Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Doreen Massey, Gillian Rose, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Antonio Negri and Yan Thomas, the contributors to this book conduct a series of jurisprudential, aesthetic and political inquiries into ‘just’ modes of occupying space, and the ways in which space comes under the signs of law and justice. Bringing together leading critical legal scholars with theorists and practitioners from other disciplines within the humanities, Spaces of Justice investigates unexplored associations between law and architectural theory, the visual arts, geography and cultural studies. The book contributes to the ongoing destabilisation of the boundaries between law and the broader humanities and will be of considerable interest to scholars and students with an interest in the normative dimensions of law’s ‘spatial turn’.

The Enduring Legacies of Nineteenth Century French Crime Fiction

Andrea Goulet, Associate Professor of French, University of Pennsylvania, has published Legacies of the Rue Morgue:  Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Taking Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" as an inaugural frame, Andrea Goulet traces shifting representations of violence, space, and nation in French crime fiction from serial novels of the 1860s to cyberpunk fictions today. She argues that the history of spatial sciences—geology, paleontology, cartography—helps elucidate the genre's fundamental tensions: between brutal murder and pure reason; historical past and reconstructive present; national identity and global networks. As the sciences underlying her analysis make extensive use of strata and grids, Goulet employs vertical and horizontal axes to orient and inform her close readings of crime novels. Vertically, crimes that take place underground subvert above-ground modernization, and national traumas of the past haunt present criminal spaces. Horizontally, abstract crime scene maps grapple with the sociological realities of crime, while postmodern networks of international data trafficking extend colonial anxieties of the French nation. Crime gangs in the catacombs of 1860s Paris. Dirt-digging detectives in coastal caves at the fin-de-siècle. Schizoid cartographers in global cyberspace. Crime fiction's sites of investigation have always exposed central rifts in France's national identity while signaling broader, enduring unease with violent disruptions to social order. Reading murder novels of the last 150 years in the context of shifting sciences, Legacies of the Rue Morgue provides a new spatial history of modern crime fiction.

Here are some early reviews.

"Those who love detective fiction and film—or just France—will learn here to be detectives of the city of Paris above and below ground. The ghoulish, the geological, and the sublime merge in the layers of burial grounds, literary texts, and scientific paradigms. It is a wonderful book."—Deborah Jenson, Duke University "

The astounding variety, strength, and coherence of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks—involving the cultural history of crime and detection; the history of sciences; cutting-edge urban, space, and place studies; trauma theory and psychoanalysis; a deconstructionist approach to language and textuality; a literary history renewed by a history of the print media—as well as the brilliant close readings of various embodiments of modern and postmodern crime fiction make Legacies of the Rue Morgue an absolute intellectual delight."—Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara

The book is available both in hardcover and as an ebook. Each is priced at $65.00.

 

Law In Its Space

Forthcoming from Routledge Publishing:

Leif Dahlberg, Spacing Law and Politics: The Constitution and Representation of the Juridical (2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Examining the inherent spatiality of law, both theoretically and as social practice, this book presents a genealogical account of the emergence and the development of the juridical. In an analysis that stretches from ancient Greece, through late antiquity and early modern and modern Europe, and on to the contemporary courtroom, it considers legal and philosophical texts, artistic and literary works, as well as judicial practices, in order to elicit and document a series of critical moments in the history of juridical space. Offering a more nuanced understanding of law than that found in traditional philosophical, political or social accounts of legal history, Dahlberg forges a critical account of the intimate relations between law and politics that shows how juridical space is determined and conditioned in ways that are integral to the very functioning – and malfunctioning – of law.

Thinking About Law Spatially

New from Routledge Publishing:

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (2015).


Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

There can be no justice that is not spatial. Against a recent tendency to despatialise law, matter, bodies and even space itself, this book insists on spatialising them, arguing that there can be neither law nor justice that are not articulated through and in space.
Spatial Justice presents a new theory and a radical application of the material connection between space – in the geographical as well as sociological and philosophical sense – and the law – in the broadest sense that includes written and oral law, but also embodied social and political norms. More specifically, it argues that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. Seen in this way, spatial justice is the most radical offspring of the spatial turn, since, as this book demonstrates, spatial justice can be found in the core of most contemporary legal and political issues – issues such as geopolitical conflicts, environmental issues, animality, colonisation, droning, the cyberspace and so on. In order to ague this, the book employs the lawscape, as the tautology between law and space, and the concept of atmosphere in its geological, political, aesthetic, legal and biological dimension.
Written by a leading theorist in the area, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere forges a new interdisciplinary understanding of space and law, while offering a fresh approach to current geopolitical, spatiolegal and ecological issues.