Legal geography: Perspective and methods. TayanahO'Donnell, Daniel FRobinson, and JosephineGillespieLondon: Routledge; 2020. xvii and 310 pp. ISBN‐10: 1138387371 and ISBN‐13: 978‐1138387379 $73

This collection of essays is about legal geography, research methods, and context. It comprises 17 chapters by contributors from various countries including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Thailand, Switzerland, and Vanuatu. The topics considered range from Indigenous land rights, climate change, and water management to the provision of health services and much else besides. Underpinning each contribution and the book as a whole is a commitment to understanding the geographical expression of law in theory and practice. This commitment extends to the ways in which law is framed by geography whether through judicial accommodation or, more profoundly, by negotiation over the status of law as a concept and its realisation in place. For the editors, the book is also a heartfelt acknowledgement of the influence of one of their mentors, the late Stewart Williams, who was an academic at the University of Tasmania. The book is organised into six parts. The first part is the Introduction by the editors wherein they suggest that there is something distinctive about “Australian legal geography scholarship” focusing, as it does, on issues of environment, development, and culture. The second part of the book begins with a chapter by Gillespie on research methods in cross-cultural settings (chapter 2). It is followed by a pair of chapters on Indonesia, community alliances, and Islam (by Calyx, Jessup, and Sihombing [chapter 3] and Schenk [chapter 4]), another on Indigenous knowledge in Vanuatu by Robinson, Raven, Kalfatak, Tari, Tualima, and Hickey (chapter 5), and one by Bargh and van Wegner on Maori law and protocols (chapter 6). The third part of the book focuses upon “legal geographies of regulation” with a chapter by O'Donnell on the role of law and lawyers in relation to climate change (chapter 7). In chapter 8, Godden looks at Indigenous land rights in Australia and considers the status of space and place in theory and in practice. In chapter 9, Spencer provides a commentary on legal instruments and statutes transplanted from one jurisdiction to another and the consequences thereof. Chapter 10, by Bartel, focuses on categories of law in practice—in this case, environmental law in New South Wales. Rounding out this Part of the book, McFarland considers expert testimony using the methods of human geography (chapter 11). Part four of the book provides four case studies—Graham on coal mining and water management (chapter 12), Turton on legal practice as regards the framing and passage of legislation related to coal seam gas (chapter 13), Sherval on energy and fossil fuel generation in the United Kingdom and Australia, paying particular regard to community resistance and activism (chapter 14), and Rickards and Jolley on law and geography informed by critical and feminist theories as applied to the Latrobe Valley (chapter 15). Part five reprints one of Stewart Williams's papers on the provision and regulation of public health in Sydney (chapter 16). Finally, the editors recap the volume's intent, emphasising cross-cultural perspectives, the people-place-law nexus, and methodology. To say that this is an interesting book errs on the mundane and, worse, could be read as damning by faint praise. In fact, this book is truly remarkable on three counts. First, the contributors have, more often than not, training in law and human geography, experience in how law works in specific settings and specific issues (context), and a good understanding of law as a practice not just as an institution. Second, each contribution gives more or less equal weight to law and geography in the sense that the latter is not subsumed by the former nor is the former denied its status by virtue of the latter. Third, the contributors have a progressive agenda in that they argue that law can be an instrument for change even if, in some cases, opportunities for change can be forestalled by doctrine and precedent. Throughout, the contributors are self-conscious about the methods of human geography whether field-based, qualitative, and/or quantitative. For example, Gillespie's contribution provides the reader with insights about research methods including “where, who and how the primary fieldwork data are collected.” Calyx et al. take the reader into community-based research framed by a decision of the Indonesian constitutional court and informed by research on community awareness of their rights, including data imaging, mapping technologies, and the like. The lead co-editor, O'Donnell, focuses upon climate change and provides a detailed account of the methods used, their purpose, and the fit between case studies and conventional legal analysis. No recipe book is proposed that would reconcile the methods of legal argument and evidence with the methods of human geography. Rather, the author is self-conscious about what each adds to our understanding of the issues. From the outset, the editors suggest that their book and the contributions therein provide a “critical” perspective on the intersection between law and human geography. An important theme in contemporary human geography is its critical stance, favouring disputation and argument about convention whether formal as in legal doctrine or less formal as in the claims made by political classes and economic interests. For those motivated by a concern about government climate change policy (or lack thereof), a critical perspective carries with it a level of urgency as represented by social movements including the “climate emergency.” Here, these commitments and sentiments are on display. But there is something more to these essays than dissent. The contributors want readers to understand the specifics of the issues from a geographical perspective and the ways in which law intersects with those issues to inform our understanding of law and society. Legal practice is concerned with doctrine and the specifics of cases, and this concern is visible throughout the book. Equally, the contributors know a lot about the context in which they are working; they do not gloss over the specifics in a race towards a critical perspective on law. More often than not, the contributors give both their due. Perhaps this concern—for law and for geography—is an expression of the methods of legal training such as analysing cases and decisions just as it is an expression of the motivations behind becoming a human geographer. One way or another, every contributor has at their fingertips the detail of legal cases and the the context of cases. Twenty-five years ago, or more, research on law and geography was often anchored in critical legal studies. So, for example, a number of contributors to this book reference Judges and the Cities (1985), which was conceived in the debate about law as an institution, its methods of argument, and its societal consequences. This movement was quite different from other movements or programs of socio-legal studies. It had as its object the role of law as a coercive instrument used to make cities not just imprint upon cities obligations and commitments through legal instruments. At one level, this book goes beyond socio-legal studies to engage with law as an instrument for making the present and the future. This reach is interesting on a number of counts. Most obviously, the contributors are not content to invent another socio-legal studies movement so much as give expression to law as geographers in ways that allow us to better understand the adjudication of competing claims about our separate and shared futures. In this sense, their aspirations for change drive the project much more than a sense of making do with the present through a critical perspective on law as an institution. At another level, this book is not an exercise in consciousness raising. Those in the critical legal studies movement could be accused of speaking to privileged (white) law students about a world barely glimpsed from their comfortable homes in suburban New York, Boston, or wherever. They sought to hold students to account for their assumptions about law as a means to an end, as an opportunity for a career, and as an institution that protects their interests. Critical legal scholars used the core subjects of the legal curriculum, such as contracts and property law, to challenge assumptions that law is neutral and is an expression of accepted norms and conventions. They emphasised power, coercion, and interests not represented in the theory and practice of adjudication. In this book, the contributors reach out to the reader about the world in its various manifestations, a world that is changing and will have to change for the better when it comes to climate change. Unlike the critical legal studies movement, the objective of this book is to mobilise law and geography separately and together around fundamental issues including communities' environmental prospects. This book is an outstanding contribution to the literature. It is a step beyond the research program on law and geography developed over the past few decades. It begins with culture, society, and the environment in Australia and the Asia-Pacific and extends to fundamental questions about the constitution of time and space by law and the constitution of law by geography utilising the skills and expertise of human geographers.

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