Expanding Legal Geographies
Expanding Legal Geographies
A Call for a Critical Comparative Approach
This chapter argues that the project of expanding the horizons of legal geography should involve the adoption of a comparative outlook, inspired by and contributing to comparative law scholarship. The chapter focuses on colonial and postcolonial settings, interrogates processes of displacement and dispossession, and argues that these are important sites to engage in critical comparative legal geographical research. The argument is illustrated by an investigation of a legal geography triangle within the British “legal family”—Britain, Mandatory Palestine/Israel, and India/Pakistan—showing how ideas and legal concepts embodied in British war legislation were transplanted to and transformed in postpartition India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine in the form of evacuee property acts and absentee property legislation. These laws facilitated the taking and reallocation of refugee property and played an important part in the radical sociospatial transformations of the postindependence era that linger to this day.
Keywords: custom, democracy, Dewey, dualism, embodiment, habit, law, power, pragmatism, property
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