Book review: DAVID DELANEY, The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making: Nomospheric Investigations. Abingdon: Routledge/Glasshouse Press, 2010, pp. 224, ISBN 9780415463195, £75 (hbk)
| Author | Sharron A Fitzgerald |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639110200030703 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
DAVID DELANEY, The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making: Nomospheric
Investigations. Abingdon: Routledge/Glasshouse Press, 2010, pp. 224,
ISBN 9780415463195, £75 (hbk).
David Delaney’s book is a welcome contribution to the field of critical legal geography.
In the first of six chapters, Delaney begins by identifying the reasons why he believes
critical legal geography has reached an impasse. He observes that the field is a trans-
disciplinary project. Yet, scholars tend to visit what he terms the law–space nexus, and
then return to their home disciplines. Such a ‘parcelization’ of the subject matter into
‘areas of law’ and ‘areas of geography’ means that we continue to treat ‘law’ and ‘space’
as discrete, rather than as mutually constituted and inscribed. Furthermore, the author
asserts that this reading of ‘law and geography’ continues to privilege law over space
by treating ‘space as a backdrop to law’ (p. 13). Delaney notes that for critical legal
geography to move beyond its current intellectual stalemate, we must begin to view ‘the
legal more in material terms’ (p. 20). He asserts that in order for this to happen, we need an
over-arching theory or conceptual language that can accommodate ‘the performance of
law as ‘‘repositioned’’ in the material’ (p. 22). Therefore, Delaney explains that the prin-
cipal purpose of Nomospheric Investigations is to illustrate a variety of interconnected
points: first, he wishes to show how geographical space and law are constituted through
each other; second, he wants to demonstrate how they are imagined, performed or materi-
alized in terms of each other; and finally, he wants to interrogate how social actors imag-
ine, perform and materialize identities and concepts such as justice in spatio-legal terms. It
is these objectives that drive the remaining chapters of the book.
Staying with the nomosphere, Delaney beginsthe task of attempting to ‘loosen the law
and geography binary’ (p. 19). He arguesthat law is more ‘worldly than questions of what
law is for’ (p. 19, my emphasis). He is neither interested in what ‘the spatial’ and
‘the legal’ are, nor how they are related. Rather his approach enters the debate by
concentrating on ‘how they happen’ and how they are implicated in ‘the pragmatics of
world making’ (p. 24). In fact, it is this notion of law as ‘worlded’ that underpins much
of Delaney’s thesis.
It is at this juncturethat the author introduces his neologisms, namelythe ‘nomosphere’
and the ‘nomospheric’.He defines the nomosphere as those‘cultural-material environs that
are constituted by the reciprocal materialization of ‘‘the legal,’’ and the legal signification
of the ‘‘socio-spatial,’’ and the practical, performative engagements through which such
constitutive momentshappen and unfold’ (p. 25). Simply put, Delaneyuses these concepts
to chart a way through the complex,interconnected and fluid ‘blendings of worlds ... in
which our lives are always embedded and through which our lives are always unfolding’
(p. 26). He asserts that the materiality and performance of law are the interworking of
power, and its meaning lies in dimensions of these worlds. He terms the interworking of
power or how law is ‘worlded’ as expressionsof the ‘nomic’ or ‘nomicity’ (p. 27). The for-
mer term represents how powerfinds expression in the world. The latter term corresponds
to how human social existence articulatespower relationships. Delaney dedicates his book
to developing a set of analytical and interpretative frameworks with which to investigate
nomosphericity, and the interplay of the nomospheric imaginaries, performativities and
spatialities in the power relationships of the everyday.
Book reviews 407
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