Spatializing Law

Professor Franz von Benda-Beckmann is joint Head of the Project Group on Legal Pluralism at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He is Honorary Professor for Ethnology at the University of Leipzig, and Honorary Professor for Legal Pluralism at the University of Halle. Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is joint Head of the Project Group on Legal Pluralism at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and Professor in Anthropology of Law, Faculty of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Law & Society Association. Dr Anne Griffiths is Professor of Law and Anthropology at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on anthropology of law, comparative and family law, African law, gender, culture and rights.

• Contents: Space and legal pluralism: an introduction, Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Anne Griffiths; Peasant community and territorial strategies in the Andean highlands of Peru, Monique Nuitjen and Davíd Lorenzo Rodríguez; Migrants, settlers and refugees: law and the contestation of 'citizenship' in Bhutan, Richard W. Whitecross; The spatial and temporal role of law in natural resource management: the impact of state regulation of fishing spaces, Melanie G. Wiber; The sultan's map. Arguing one's land in Pasir, Laurens Bakker; Contested spaces of authority in Indonesia, Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann; The new global legal order as local phenomenon: the special court for Sierra Leone, Gerhard Anders; The myth of the transparent table: reconstructing space and legal interventions in Scottish children's hearings, Anne Griffiths and Randy F. Kandel; The regulation of commodity exchange in Southern Africa during the 8th to 15th centuries CE, Edwin N. Wilmsen; Can there be maps of law?, Maarten Bavinck and Gordon R. Woodman; Index.

'To spatialize law is to venture into exciting and still largely untracked space. This collection, which ranges from Glasgow to Sierra Leone, from Canada to Peru, provides detailed examples of the too-often overlooked entanglements of legal practice and knowledge with the foundational geographies of social and political life. Extending analyses of legal pluralism, Spatializing Law also reveals the presence of multiple legal geographies, materialized and fought over through maps, places, and spaces. Legal anthropology, critical legal geography, and socio-legal studies will be enriched by this important contribution.' Nicholas Blomley, Simon Fraser University, Canada 'Spatializing Law turns geography over, exposing its provisionality, contestability and high political stakes. The result is a collection that challenges conventional understandings about how and where regulation enters social life - through essays keyed to the contradictions of globalization viewed "from the ground" as disparate forms of alienation, attachment, governance and history-making.' Carol Greenhouse, Princeton University, USA