Dancing with wolves: Making legal territory in a more-than-human world

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Spacing Out: Towards a Critical Geography of Law

The authors analyze the interconnections between space, law, and power and forge links between critical studies in law and geography. Analytical categories of space-for example, the divide between public and private space, or the concept of national citizenship-are all politically constructed. The authors analyze Canadian and American concepts of federalism and their impact on regulating worker safety. A common judicial mapping of work, local space, and state regulation determines whether local officials have enforcement authority in contexts where national worker safety regulations apply. Through this analysis, the authors illustrate the potential for future studies in critical legal geography

Spacing Out: Towards a Critical Geography of Law

The authors analyze the interconnections between space, law, and power and forge links between critical studies in law and geography. Analytical categories of space-for example, the divide between public and private space, or the concept of national citizenship-are all politically constructed. The authors analyze Canadian and American concepts of federalism and their impact on regulating worker safety. A common judicial mapping of work, local space, and state regulation determines whether local officials have enforcement authority in contexts where national worker safety regulations apply. Through this analysis, the authors illustrate the potential for future studies in critical legal geography

Are Tents a \u27Home\u27? Extending Section 8 Privacy Rights for the Precariously Housed

The home, for most of us, is an obvious zone to assert privacy and property rights. However, this is not the case for those whose control of residential space is precarious. Our paper focuses on privacy rights under the Canadian constitution for those living in tents and, specifically, the judicial rejection of a tent as a home garnering legal protection under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We focus on a 2018 case from British Columbia, R. v. Picard, the only judicial decision that we could locate that has explored this question. In holding that the tent is not a home, Picard draws from the venerable castle doctrine, the deeply rooted legal principle that cements enhanced legal protection for the home. Drawing from legal geography, we argue that the castle doctrine is grounded in a particular legal-spatial imaginary, such that the home is represented in its ideal form as a privately owned detached dwelling. The connection between privacy rights and the home, as reflected in jurisprudence, is grounded in property rights, which formally excluded all but white men in colonial North America and continues to be linked to systemic inequality. As we illustrate in this paper, the exclusion of those in tents and other forms of precarious housing, including those dwelling in cars, from exercising enhanced privacy rights afforded to the home exacerbates the inequalities of the most vulnerable, such that the legal protections of “home” are not available to those living in tents. We conclude that the basis for the denial of tents as homes is legally flawed and should be reconsidered in future jurisprudence

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities is a global research network funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774) and housed at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. This open-access volume, co-edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, brings together movement-based and university-based scholars to build a shared field of inquiry focused on housing justice. Based on a convening that took place in Los Angeles in January 2019, at the LA Community Action Network and at the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays and interventions situate housing justice in the long struggle for freedom on stolen land. Embedded in the stark inequalities of Los Angeles, our work is necessarily global, connecting the city’s Skid Row to the indebted and evicted in Spain and Greece, to black women’s resistance in Brazil, to the rights asserted by squatters in India and South Africa. Learning from radical social movements, we argue that housing justice also requires a commitment to research justice. With this in mind, our effort to build a field of inquiry is also necessarily an endeavor to build epistemologies and methodologies that are accountable to communities that are on the frontlines of banishment and displacement

Producing the outlaw zone : property law and the geographies of relegation

Drawing from ongoing, community-based research in the poorest part of Vancouver, Canada, a neighbourhood long demonized as an ‘outlaw zone’, we suggest that what may appear to be illegal property practices in the area's infamous residential hotels may, in fact, be harder to detach from formal legality than supposed. A space of decades of systematic legal relegation, the outlaw zone is a product of law, not its antithesis.Non UBCUnreviewedFacult

Simplification is complicated: property, nature, and the rivers of law

A number of scholars have criticized the ways in which property law simplifies nature. Such reductive simplifications are seen as being reliant upon a claim to mastery and dominion that is belied by the essential complexity and dynamism of the natural world. Drawing from a close reading of a property-boundary dispute involving the historical movements of the Missouri River, I supplement this account by revealing the ways in which legal simplication is itself complicated: that is, both dependent on considerable amounts of practical work, and subject to breakdown, ambiguity, and contradiction. Rather than a singular river, made legible through the unfolding of a unitary legal logic, I reveal several conflicting ‘rivers’ produced through property law. I conclude by trying to make sense of property as a set of practices that serve to produce the ‘effect’ of property. These practices, while often messy and contradictory, are, nevertheless, significant in the installation of property as a powerful organizing device through which the social world is made meaningful.