Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society focuses on law and its location, exploring how spaces are constructed on the terrestrial and marine surface of the earth with legal means in a rich variety of socio-political, legal and ecological settings. The contributors explore the interrelations between social spaces and physical space, highlighting the ways in which legal rules may localise people's rights and obligations in social space that may be mapped onto physical space. This volume also demonstrates how different notions of space and place become resources that can be mobilised in social, political and economic interaction, paying specific attention to the contradictory ways in which space may be configured and involved in social interaction under conditions of plural legal orders. Spatializing Law makes a significant contribution to the anthropological geography of law and will be useful to scholars across a broad array of disciplines.

'To spatialize law is to venture into exciting and still largely untracked space. This collection, which ranges from Glasgow to Sierra Leone, from Canada to Peru, provides detailed examples of the too-often overlooked entanglements of legal practice and knowledge with the foundational geographies of social and political life. Extending analyses of legal pluralism, Spatializing Law also reveals the presence of multiple legal geographies, materialized and fought over through maps, places, and spaces. Legal anthropology, critical legal geography, and socio-legal studies will be enriched by this important contribution.' Nicholas Blomley, Simon Fraser University, Canada 'Spatializing Law turns geography over, exposing its provisionality, contestability and high political stakes. The result is a collection that challenges conventional understandings about how and where regulation enters social life - through essays keyed to the contradictions of globalization viewed "from the ground" as disparate forms of alienation, attachment, governance and history-making.' Carol Greenhouse, Princeton University, USA

Professor Franz von Benda-Beckmann is joint Head of the Project Group on Legal Pluralism at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He is Honorary Professor for Ethnology at the University of Leipzig, and Honorary Professor for Legal Pluralism at the University of Halle. Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is joint Head of the Project Group on Legal Pluralism at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and Professor in Anthropology of Law, Faculty of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Law & Society Association. Dr Anne Griffiths is Professor of Law and Anthropology at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on anthropology of law, comparative and family law, African law, gender, culture and rights.