Spaces of Law and Custom

<p>This collection brings together a carefully curated selection of researchers from law sociology anthropology philosophy history social ontology and international relations in order to examine how law and custom interact within specific material and spatial contexts.</p><p>Normativity develops within these contexts while also shaping them. This complex relationship exists within all physical places from traditional agrarian spaces to the modern shifting post-industrial workplace. The contributions gathered together in this volume explore numerous examples of such spaces from different disciplinary perspectives to interrogate the dynamic relationship between custom and law and the material spaces they inhabit. While there are a dynamic series of conclusions regarding this relationship in different material realities a common theme is pursued throughout: a proper understanding of law and custom stems from their material locatedness within the power dynamics of particular spaces which in turn are reflexively shaped by that same normativity. The book thus generates an account of the locatedness of law and custom and indeed of custom as a source of law. In this way it provides a series of linked explorations of normative spaces but more fundamentally it also furnishes a cross-disciplinary toolkit of concepts and critical tools for understanding law and custom and their relationship.</p><p>As the diversity of the contributors indicates this book will be of great interest to legal theorists of different traditions also legal historians and anthropologists as well as sociologists historians geographers and developmental economists.</p>