Law and geography: the law’s space and the world of the geography

Abstract

Law tends to isolation, as can be seen in Kelsen’s radical positivism explaining law through law, and rejecting any form of interdisciplinary research. On the contrary, law needs to interact with other scientific fields and therefore the present text traces a broad overview of the interaction between law and geography. Public Law, for instance, needs geography in order to define both the outside borders of a State in comparison with other States, and the internal borders of regions, provinces etc. Law, geography and politics played a seminal role during the European dictatorships of the 20th century: “Geopolitics” was not only a subject of cultural research, but also a relevant justification of the military conquest of “vital space”. In the same era, paralleling with “Geopolitics” a new discipline was created – “Geo-jurisprudence”, but with a far lesser success. After World-War 2 geopolitics was de facto abandoned, being considered an ideological ingredient of the dictatorships, and substituted by the study of “international relations”: another name for almost the same subject. Today the dictatorship-originated stigma is overruled and geopolitics comes back as a scientific discipline. One of the reasons of this renaissance is due to the fact that globalization has changed the space perception also in the legal world. State borders are not any more relevant for multinational enterprises, Internet, satellites, ecology, atomic or pollution problems etc. The space technology transformed the heaven space in a place similar to the earth space – with gigantic economical and military implications. In the legal field, the multinational enterprises are elaborating over-statual rules – the so called “soft law” – with a strong, although non-statual binding force. The conflict between globalization and traditional, geographically delimitated State law is one of the causes of the present economical world crisis. Therefore it opens the discussion on the need of coming back to State originated and territorially vinculated legal norms, also to re-invent a limitation of the corporate “soft law” though a State-generated “hard law”.