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This book invites readers to critically rethink the interrelations between geography and the law. Traditionally, legal-geographical interrelations have been dominated by scholars with backgrounds in geopolitics, economics, or geography. More recently, a new interdisciplinary approach has been developed with the aim of offering a fresh perspective on how law and geography intersect. There has been a steady growth in cross-disciplinary research in this field; how legal-geographical taxonomies interrelate has attracted attention from scholars and academics with a diverse range of backgrounds – namely, law, anthropology, and human/physical geography –, thus giving rise to several publications. Against this backdrop, the book adopts a legal comparative perspective and assesses 'normative spatialities', which are the outcomes of processes of legal-spatial production. In addition, the comparative analysis offers readers new insights on some traditional geographic features which are essential to legal studies (territorial identity, regional demarcation, territorial alternation, and place-name policy). Examples are drawn from several jurisdictions (both from the Global North and the Global South) and partly employ a diachronic perspective. As its subversive character is ideally suited to revealing policies and agendas, comparative law is used to identify the ethnocentric and colonial biases underpinning the use (and misuse) of legal geographic devices by policymakers and academics. In sum, the book presents legal geography as an interdisciplinary undertaking in which geographers and legal scholars can jointly examine common concepts in the historical, cultural, political and social contexts in which law is practised. The book transcends the boundaries between disciplines to engage in a fruitful dialogue on how the law can help to address the current socio-geographic and ecological crises.

Abstract
This essay examines the notion of constitutional deliverance within the Victorian settlement. The expression points to the way constitutional arrangements react to threats that may disrupt the politico-legal order. Rooted in constitutional morality, it entails executing justice, restoring order, and protecting individuals' rights and freedoms. To this end, it analyses Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister, i.e. three of the six Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels, and explores whether the freedom of the press executed constitutional deliverance in the Victorian era. The essay will focus on Mr Quintus Slide, the editor of the People's Banner, whose acts of moralisation seem to fit into the (political and biblical) notion of deliverance. The article argues that Slide used the press not to deliver the Nation, but to avenge his own interests. In so doing, he contradicted the idea of constitutional deliverance as embedded in Parliament, where the anointed Monarch summons His body politic to execute justice and protect it.

The manufacturing of colonial legal spatialities in the Age of Discovery has traditionally been studied by historians, human geographers, and cartographers. Seldom have legal scholars examined it. This essay aims to fill the gap in legal research and assesses processes of spatial production that took place in colonies by adopting a legal-geographical approach. Special attention is paid to how the English, and later British Empires manufactured both terrestrial and oceanic spaces. The essay maintains that, within what this article calls the 'Anglo/British Empire', the integrated geographies of land and sea were facilitated by some intrinsic qualities of the English common law. Its legal coding devised a holistic approach that captured the whole earth even beyond the divide between land and sea.

Abstract
The essay stages the law at the intersections between the humanities, technology, and the production of digital space. Interactions like these are relevant in the present age, where humankind is outcompeting natural resources and changing the earth. The Anthropocene is an epoch of environmental crisis; despite this, we turn such a crisis into a process of sublimation servient to the control of the earth. Blurring the divide between the digital and the human is functional to such a process. The strategic use of the law makes climate-change policies compatible with global markets. Assuming that manufacturing digital spaces is useful to this end, the essay focuses on multimedia games. Blending real-word performances with internet- and media-related contents, they are functional to sublimation, convincing us that we can tackle climate change without rearranging our economic paradigms.

This article addresses how climate change triggers relevant transformations in the realm of the law and affects our politico-legal paradigms. To this end, it delivers cross-disciplinary research by focusing on a non-fictional literary genre, i.e. climate-change pop-science, which has arisen very recently. The article also explores the concept of 'strategic formalism', i.e. a strategic legal device unable to govern societal concerns. On the one hand, it shapes our approach to climate change and migration; on the other, it adapts ecological issues to the 'traditional' legal framework. Against this background, the article argues that non-fictional texts also reflect the ideas of the most active forces within society, and fuel dynamism when tackling the ecological crisis. In a time of climate change, these forces stir strategic formalism, and make the law act as a bridge linking our troubled reality to an inclusive future.

The essay examines how Neoliberal economic models trigger changes in the realm of constitutional law. It suggests such changes be assessed by a double change of mood. The first change regards the perspective whereby legal studies consider how economic variables affect and change the law. Instead of merely focusing on the current financial crisis, the essay assumes that economics and constitutional law have been interacting for centuries. The second change points to legal methodological innovations. The essay argues that comparative law provides us with an adequate methodology when it comes to analysing how economics affects the legal domain. Owing to its subversive potential, comparative law methodology assists us in examining how economics, democracy and legal change interrelate. In challenging legal formalism, comparative law broadens the scope of legal research so as to consider how non-legal factors trigger changes in the field of constitutional law. The essay then considers the quantitative turn in law, and therefore focuses on the constitutionalisation of balanced budgetary rules in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The essay argues that such a constitutionalisation is a by-product of the Neoliberal economic agenda, whose aim is to impose constitutional recipients to adapt to the needs of transnational financial actors. Summary:1. The economic roots of constitutional change. – 2. Methodological underpinnings: resurgent formalism and constitutional change. – 3. Neoliberal economic models and nominal democracy. – 4. Facing methodological biases: Comparative law and and the defiance of the Neoliberal paradigm. – 5. The reasons for constitutional change: The quantitative turn in legal studies. – 6. The change in lawyers' mentality and its symptoms: Constitutionalising budgetary rules. – 7. The economic turn triggered by balanced budgets: Rights, lawmaking and federalising processes. – 8. Econometric constitutions and federalism. – 9. Economics triumphant? Lawyers' autism and the role of comparative law. ; El ensayo trata de examinar el impacto del modelo económico neoliberal en los procesos de mutaciones constitucionales a través de un doble cambio, esto es, de perspectiva y método. El cambio de perspectiva propone abandonar las modalidades mediante las que, en la última década, se ha valorado el impacto de los factores económicos sobre cambios constitucionales. En lugar de centrarse en la crisis económica, el ensayo considera la interacción entre la Economía y el Derecho constitucional como un fenómeno históricamente recurrente y facilitador de mutaciones jurídicas. El cambio de método deriva de la aplicación de la comparación jurídica para el estudio de dichos procesos de mutación. A este respecto, la comparación propone re-imaginar política y jurídicamente la relación entre economía, democracia y cambios constitucionales. De esta manera, se propone suavizar el formalismo de la ciencia jurídica tradicional para conseguir valoraciones más amplias de los fenómenos –entre otros, económicos– que empujan a cambios en la esfera de lo jurídico-constitucional. Puesto que la relación entre mentalidad económica y mensuración cuantitativa del Derecho se expresa en gran medida a través del proceso de constitucionalización del principio del equilibrio presupuestario, el ensayo analiza la relevancia de su constitucionalización aplicando el potencial«subversivo» de la comparación: por un lado, ésta facilita el desvelamiento de las ideologías que subyacen a la mensuración cuantitativa; por otro, nos indica las modalidades por las que los actores de las finanzas globales concretan su propia agenda política procurando –o, mejor dicho, imponiendo– cambios relevantes en la esfera del Derecho constitucional.

Abstract
The article focuses on the epistemological paradigms that underpin the current trends in comparative legal research, by assessing them within the framework of the law-and-literature movement. In particular, it examines the scientific state of mind and the veering towards quantitative approaches which now percolate through legal comparative studies. The article argues that such state of mind is not merely confined to the ambit of comparative law. It has indeed several traits in common with the scientific mentality which has been saturating the knowledge system in Western culture since the seventeenth century. This scientific state of mind was one of Jonathan Swift's main targets. In Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, Swift satirised the seventeenth-century scientific program, which had reduced the advancement of knowledge into a system that is very similar to twenty-first century information systems. This reduction was influenced by Cartesian philosophy and was achieved through methodological innovation. But it was also a consequence of the debate on ancient and modern learning, which had originated in France, but had immediate resonance in England. Swift rejected absolute reliance on quantitative methods: not only does this make it possible to set an equation between law and literature, but it also allows us to bring humanities into the debate about quantification in comparative law – and, as a consequence, to reappraise through literature some common assumptions we usually make about the law.

Abstract
The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan's impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray's representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.

Abstract
This essay addresses different patterns of the visualisation of the law. It examines how scholars attempt to depict, represent, and perform the law and its founding authority. It also focuses on the pragmatics of legal language: written and spoken standard legal English are pragmatically enriched within contexts where the law is interpreted, uttered, or performed. The linguistic notion of "context" discloses the interrelations between the agendas of law and power and reveals how the law conveys its content to the body politic as its ultimate addressee. It then proposes a renewed concept of legal linguistics. In order to determine the different ideologies underpinning the evolution of English legal language, as well as its prototypical forms of the visualisation of the law, three stages in the history of the English language will be examined: Late Middle English, Early Modern English, and Contemporary English. Each of these stages will be likened to the different parts of judicial proceedings. This will allow us to examine how English legal language has been used in a specific context, the trial, where the law is both uttered and performed.

AbstractThis article examines the accommodation of divided societies through constituent units, and concentrates on "legal geography" as a principle of organization in multi- or bi-ethnic federal states. It then considers the key concepts related thereto: regional demarcation and territorial alteration. Comparative legal studies show that divided societies can be governed through territorial demarcation and alteration. However, ethnic-based demarcation is currently under strain. Indeed, economic factors reduce the relevance of ethnic, linguistic and religious factors. The intersection of traditional and socioeconomic factors represents a challenge to ethnic-construed territorial identity, and implies a reassessment of the criteria presiding over political demarcation. ; ResumenEl artículo examina los medios mediante que se consigue la cohabitación de comunidades altamente diferenciadas por lengua, confesión religiosa, cultura en sistema federales. La cohabitación – que se realiza, entre otras formas, a través de entes territoriales – corresponde al concepto de geografía jurídica (legal geography), verdadero principio de organización de estados federales multi- o bi-nacionales. Pues, el artículo explora los conceptos de mayor transcendencia y que se encuentran conectados al de geografía jurídica: la delimitación de las circunscripciones territoriales de los entes sub-estatales (regional demarcation) y los mecanismos para su modificación (territorial alteration). La comparación en ámbito jurídicos revalida la idea de que el gobierno y la gestión de sociedades altamente diferenciadas pueda ser conseguido con ambos instrumentos (territorial demarcation y alteration). Sin embargo, la delimitación del territorio sub-estatal fundamentada bajo la adopción de criterios étnicos se encuentra afectada por parte de elementos y factores económicos, que reducen cada día más el relieve de aquellos étnicos, lingüísticos y religiosos. La encrucijada de varios criterios y factores – sean los tradicionales, sean los de índole socio-económica – representa el desafío de las ethnic-construed territorial identity, y implica una renovada valoración y evaluación de los mismo criterios que rigen las formas de demarcación territorial.Abstract This article examines the accommodation of divided societies through constituent units, and concentrates on "legal geography" as a principle of organization in multi- or bi-ethnic federal states. It then considers the key concepts related thereto: regional demarcation and territorial alteration. Comparative legal studies show that divided societies can be governed through territorial demarcation and alteration. However, ethnic-based demarcation is currently under strain. Indeed, economic factors reduce the relevance of ethnic, linguistic and religious factors. The intersection of traditional and socioeconomic factors represents a challenge to ethnic-construed territorial identity, and implies a reassessment of the criteria presiding over political demarcation.

Comparing and Contrasting Local Government in Multi-Layered Systems -- Part I - The Federal-local Connection in Mature Federations -- The US Local Government Organisation: Origins, Development, and Federal Implications -- Local Governments in the Canadian Federal System – Institutions, Jurisdiction and Cooperation -- Local Governance in the Swiss Federal System. Comparative and Alternative Approaches to the Traditional Paradigm -- Local Governments in Germany between Growing Challenges and Precarious Budgets -- Local Government in Australia: Constitutionally Subordinate, but Vibrant and Fundamental -- Local Governance in Austria: Diversity in Homogeneity -- Part II - The Federal-Local Connection in Devolutionary Federations -- The Municipal Regime in Argentina -- The Municipality in the Mexican Federal System -- Local Governance in Belgium: A Taste of 'Institutional Lasagna' Belgian Style -- Local Governance in Brazil: The Unresolved Contradiction between Claims to Autonomy and Centripetal Trends -- The System of Local Government in Italy: A Stress-Test to Traditional Paradigms? -- Local Autonomy in Spain: Between Autonomic Jurisdictions and the Central Level of Government -- Local Government in the United Kingdom -- Federalism, Local Government, and Transition to Authoritarianism in Russia -- 'Everything is Bridgeable' in a Post-Conflict Situation? The Situation of Local Government in Bosnia and Herzegovina -- Part III - Postcolonial Reinventions of the Federal-Local Connection -- The Federal-Local Connection: The South African Case -- Autonomy of Local Government in Ethiopia -- Local Governments, Federalism, and the Governance of Public Health in India -- Reconceptualising the Federal-Local Connection. Postcolonial Reinventions. Nigeria -- The Legal Framework of Centre-Local Connections in Malaysia. Beyond the Postcolonial Narrative: Legacy or Reinvention? -- Revisiting Taxonomies: Local Governance Beyond Western Federal Systems.