Legal Geography: Perspectives and Methods

This book is the first legal geography book to explicitly engage in method. It complements this by also bringing together different perspectives on the emerging school of legal geography. It explores human–environment interactions and showcases distinct environmental legal geography scholarship.

Legal Geography: Perspectives and Methods is an innovative book concerned with a new relational and material way of examining our legal-spatial world. With chapters examining natural resource management, Indigenous knowledge and political ecology scholarship, the text introduces legal geography’s modes of analysis and critique. The book explores topics such as Indigenous environmental rights, the impacts of extractive industries, mediation of climate change, food, animal and plant patents, fossil fuels, mining and coastal environments based on empirical, jurisdictional and methodological insights from Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific to demonstrate how space and place are invoked in legal processes and contestations, and the methods that may be employed to explore these processes and contestations.

This book examines the role of legal geographies in the 21st century beyond the simple “law in action”, and it will thus appeal to students of socio-legal studies, human geography, environmental studies, environmental policy, as well as politics and international relations.

Tayanah O’Donnell has over ten years’ experience focused on the law and the legal geographies of climate change adaptation. Her papers and research cover themes such as property rights, land use planning, climate law, coastal policy and management, and the legal, political and cultural impacts of climate change regulation.

Daniel F. Robinson has more than 15 years’ experience focused on the regulation of nature and knowledge. His papers and books cover themes including “biopiracy”, access and benefit-sharing relating to biological resources, appropriation and regulation of Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous/customary laws and biocultural protocols, ethical biotrade, political ecology, environmental policy and management.

Josephine Gillespie is an academic, and former lawyer, based at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is an environmental legal geographer interested in the complex intersection of geography and law. Her research investigates environmental protection and human–environment geographies throughout Australia and the Asia-Pacific.