W. Wesley Pue, May, 1991, 3 Windsor Review of Legal & Social Issues/ Revue des affaires juridiques et sociales - Windsor, 71-93
Towards Geo-Jurisprudence? - Formulating Research Agendas in Law and Geography

CONTENTS

• Introduction: What Poets Know
• Review of Attempts to Define Law
• Modern Approaches to Legal Studies
• Future Research Agendas in Law and Geography
• Impact Analysis
• (Geo-) Political Economy
• Embracing Legal Pluralism
• Conclusions

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is the Law.
W.H. Auden

The character of "law" seems obvious to most everyone at a common-sense level. Yet, the precise connotations of that term or of "legal studies" is elusive. Meaning constantly slips out of reach when jurist, citizen, or social theorist attempts to define the terms or to justify what they are doing when engaged in research of the "legal" - or, more difficult still, - "socio-legal" sorts.

While poets may, perhaps, be forgiven a considerable degree of muddle-headedness in approaching such an arcane enquiry it will be disturbing to non-specialists to learn that anything even remotely approaching a definition of "law" has eluded the leading social scientists and jurists of the century. H.L.A. Hart, for example, arguably the English language's leading jurisprudential thinker of the twentieth century, evaded the task of providing a definition in his seminal book The Concept of Law. He asserted simply that, with regard to the question "What is Law?", "nothing concise enough to be recognized as a definition could provide a satisfactory answer" arguing that "[t]he underlying issues are too different from each other and too fundamental to be capable of this sort of resolution." Similarly, Roger Cotterell, a leading modern sociologist of law, explicitly denies both the possibility and the utility seeking a definition of "law." In his The Sociology of Law: An Introduction, Cotterell opts instead to work only on the basis of "working models" which facilitate and organize enquiry but which may be abandoned willy-nilly when their utility for concrete purposes seems in doubt.

Recognizing that there is a degree of truth in the old adage that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" I too will decline the temptation to offer any all-embracing definition of "law." Rather, what is offered here are preliminary thoughts on perspectives about law that may be particularly fruitful in directing work in the dynamic interdisciplinary field of "law and geography." The avenues which I believe deserve special attention from pioneers in this new sub-discipline have recently been thrown into prominence in the larger field of law and society, research and I shall accordingly offer a brief - albeit idiosyncratic - account of the recent history of thought about the character of law, indicating some sources of conceptual confusion, and practical modern responses to it. Some specific implications of this work for geographical research agendas will then be highlighted.