Exploring a critical legal cartography: Law, practice, and complexities

Abstract The word cartography literally means “to write the earth.” Just as there are many ways to write a story, there are many ways to depict the world, or some part of the world, in a map. In this article, we consider the possibility of a critical legal cartography. Towards this end, we explore the main arguments for and against “mapping law” from legal scholars, human geographers, and legal anthropologists. Questions like “what does it mean to map law?” and “can we map law?” are surprisingly complex and lead to other important questions about the relationships among law, space, and cartography. We look at the multiple strands of research and fields that touch on various aspects of law and how we understand the spatio‐legal world around us. We examine the relationship between cartography and criminology through the development of the field of crime mapping and the influence of cartographic innovations throughout history on our own understanding of the spatiality of the legal world around us. Finally, we turn to recent work in the area of critical cartography, critical geopolitical cartography, and recent innovations in the field of cartography itself to set the stage for our own call towards developing a critical legal cartography.