The boundaries of property: lessons from Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter's classic children's book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit , offers an example of a well-entrenched view of property and its geographies. Drawing on this, and current scholarship on law and geography, I explore the ways in which the spatial boundaries of property are formally conceived. I then compare this model with the findings of a qualitative research project on people's everyday practices and understandings of their garden boundaries in inner city Vancouver. While this provides partial support for the formal model, I find more pervasive evidence for a very different view of the boundaries of property. While the dominant account assumes a determinate, individualistic and ordered view of the boundary, my findings suggest a more relational, porous and ambiguous alternative. The gap, however, proves instructive. In conclusion, therefore, I return to law and geography to reflect on the importance of thinking through the ways legal forms, such as property, are materially and spatially enacted within particular places. Finally, the study alerts us to the multivalent political possibilities of property. While property can, indeed, be individualistic and reified, it also contains more collective and fluid meanings.     

Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North-east England

Abstract:  In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio-spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in this paper is to extend research which explores the spatial politics of mobilisation, by attending to the multi-scalar dynamics embedded in the enactment of environmental justice (EJ) in north-east England. It is an approach that is indebted to recent work on the scalar politics of EJ, and also to the network ideas associated with actor-network theory (ANT)-inspired research on human–nature relations. Our account provides preliminary reflections on the potential for an "assemblage" perspective which draws together people, texts, machines, animals, devices and discourses in relations that collectively constitute—and scale—EJ. To conclude, and building upon this approach, we suggest future research avenues that we believe present a promising agenda for critical engagement with the production, scaling and politics of environmental (in)justice.     

The Original Justice Roberts

The Supreme Court had rarely, if ever, seen a fight quite like the one over the farewell letter to a departing Justice. It started routinely enough in the summer of 1955, when Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone drafted a letter of farewell to Justice Owen J. Roberts, who had suddenly resigned after fifteen eventful years on the Court. The six-sentence missive went first to the Senior Associate Justice, Hugo L. Black, to be signed and passed along to his Brethren.     

Multiple Contexts as Cross-classified Models: The Labor Vote in the British General Election of 1992

Voters make their decisions in social and geographical contexts that can be seen as different levels in an overall data structure. Increasingly these structures are being analyzed by multilevel models, but this approach has so far been limited to structures that are strictly hierarchical. This paper outlines the approach of cross-classified multilevel models in which units at lower levels in the structure can be nested in more than one higher-level unit simultaneously. An appropriate modeling framework is outlined, models are specified, and particular attention is paid to efficient computation. The approach is illustrated through a cross-classified logit analysis of Labor versus Conservative support for a nationally representative sample of voting behavior for the 1992 British General Election. The data is structured so that individual voters at level 1 are nested within constituencies at level 2 which are cross-classified by geographical and functional regionalizations at level 3. A conclusion discusses the general utility of a cross-classified approach to geographically based contextual research, while two technical appendices provide details on model estimation.