While spatial justice could be the most radical offspring of law’s recent spatial turn, it remains instead a geographically informed version of social justice. The majority of the existing literature on the subject has made some politically facile assumptions about space, justice and law, thereby subsuming the potentially radical into the banal. In this article, I suggest that the concept of spatial justice is the most promising platform on which to redefine, not only the connection between law and geography, but more importantly, the conceptual foundations of both law and space. More concretely, the article attempts two things: first, a radical understanding of legal spatiality. Space is not just another parameter for law, a background against which law takes place, or a process that the law needs to take into consideration. Space is intertwined with normative production in ways that law often fails to acknowledge, and part of this article is a re-articulation of the connection. Second, to suggest a conception of spatial justice that derives from a spatial law. Such a conception cannot rely on given concepts of distributive or social justice. Instead, the concept of spatial justice put forth here is informed by post-structural, feminist, post-ecological and other radical understandings of emplacement and justice, as well as arguably the most spatial of philosophical discourses, that of Deleuze–Guattari and the prescribed possibilities of space as manifold.

In this paper an attempt is made to analyse the complex relationship between law, territory and movement. Beginning with a quick overview of the notion of property, the paper suggests that this legal notion represents a way of imagining the practice of inhabiting the planet. Dwelling and travelling are explored as two alternative and complementary ways of inhabiting, and a closer inspection is paid to the moments when they confront each other both ideologically and practically. A territorial question is identified at the core of law, namely the issue of the movement of bodies in space (or motility), together with the control of such movements. From this perspective, movement is not simply one among the many objects over which law exerts control, rather law itself is a territorial endeavour, a movement that acts upon other movements.

The momentous changes that have affected European cities over the last two centuries have had profound consequences for the configuration of urban space. Urban planning and architecture, torn between the dialectically opposed forces of permanence and change, particularly in building practices and the use of urban space, have had an important influence on the material construction of cities. The outcome was a strong focus on the individual architectural artefact and, at the same time, the spread of a process of atopical fragmentation of urban space and the gradual loss of status of contact space. The latter suffered a process of deterioration due to disaffection and abandonment of the practice and a rapid shift of interest towards space decontextualised and standardised by the networks. The recent experiences of Barcelona and Berlin have been a reaction to this impoverishment of the meaning of the city, drawing on the heuristic contribution of the Italian school of urban analysis to recover the constituent elements of urban space and the conventions that have determined the appearance of European cities and are part of the tacit understanding of their inhabitants.

This paper is written by a geographer and discusses the importance of ‘thinking space relationally’ in, and for, the social sciences. According to its advocates, relational thinking insists on an open-ended, mobile, networked and actor-centred geographic becoming. I position relational space within the lineage of philosophical approaches to space, drawing on examples taken mainly from human geography. Following this, the paper highlights some silences and limits, namely factors that constrain, structure and connect space. I acknowledge relationality but insist on the connected, sometimes inertial, and always context-specific nature of spatiality. The paper then considers the normative implications of this for politics, thinking first about regions, and then about policy.

‘[T]he other is the phantasm of historiography, the object that it seeks, honors and buries. A labor of separation concerning this uncanny and fascinating proximity is effected…Alphonse Dupront has said, “The sole historical quest for ‘meaning’ remains indeed a quest for the Other, but however contradictory it may be, this project aims at ‘understanding’ and, through ‘meaning’ at hiding the alterity of this foreigner; or, in what amounts to the same thing, it aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs”.’ (De Certeau, 1998, p. 2)

This article interrogates the connections between normativity and geographical space. Specifically it focuses on the biopolitical discourses that operate around the idiom of the vulnerable female trafficked migrant in the United Kingdom. The article’s structure and argument question how state parties frame the notion of female vulnerability as a distinct biopolitical category. I argue that this process produces and sustains the perceived need for biopolitical regulation of the national community. I question how the state’s regulation of the bodies and behaviours of female trafficked migrants is entangled with anti-immigration agendas that aim to extend the power of the state extra-territorially.

The law of the city degrades time to the dimension of space. The cityscape replaces a horizon made by woods, fields and streams with a jagged silhouette of rectilinear buildings, lots and thoroughfares. Geometrically speaking, a city street is a line that has been transected into segments called blocks. Blocks, in turn, are further segmented by the placement of individual buildings, which are enumerated as ‘addresses’ in the manner of sequenced moments on the universal timeline. The city, like the law, is produced by human hands according to the logic of the conceptual pairs which the idea of linear time makes possible: ‘cause and caused’, ‘ground and grounded’ and ‘means and end’. But there is something profoundly unreal about both of these institutional spaces: at the end of the day, the Unreal City mentioned in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land corresponds to a sort of Unreal Law. Both the city and the law manifest freedom’s impossible attempt to realise its own antithesis by substituting space for time, being for becoming, reason for chance, justification for responsibility and redemption for tragedy.