Eisenberg: Navigating Legal Geographies
In Navigating Legal Geographies, Ann M. Eisenberg (West Virginia University Law) summarizes the aims and objectives of law and rurality scholarship as opposed to legal geography scholarship, attempting to identify the underlying themes of each approach while exploring how these two frameworks might interact with each other.
Eisenberg identifies the notable overlap between law and rurality and legal geography scholarship, both of which have grown over the last few decades. While Eisenberg asserts that law and rurality methods seeks to inquire into “the interconnections between law and spatiality” in order to investigate the particular problems that face rural communities, she sees legal geography as an approach that more generally maps out the law and the places where it has developed.
To compare the two approaches and navigate their potential interconnections, Eisenberg first highlights the hallmarks of each methodology. For law and rurality analyses, common themes include questions about perceived and actual rural differences with a critique of outdated stereotypes that may lead to misguided policymaking. The second hallmark of law and rural methodologies, according to Eisenberg, is articulating the worthiness and significance of rural places, often with emphasis on inequalities across rural regions. Finally, law and rurality scholars often suggest tailored interventions to address unmet rural needs, which advocate for a move away from treating all rural places the same.
In contrast, legal geography methodologies highlight the law and the space it occupies and argue that the law and the places in which it exists are interconnected and influence each other. However, these legal geography methodologies have not been widely applied to rural areas.
By demonstrating the differences between these frameworks, Eisenberg identifies the similarities between the two which center around a shared inquiry into how the law interacts with place and power. Eisenberg posits that while law and rurality cannot necessarily be encompassed within the framework of legal geography scholarship, both methodologies have something to gain from interaction. Law and rurality and legal geography can be overlaid to “cast more light on the critical phenomena of urban-rural interconnectedness and interdependence.” With this suggestion, Eisenberg encourages those working within these methodologies to consider the benefits and contributions that may be found in engaging in the alternative frameworks the two fields offer.
