Taking the Spatial Dimensions of Norms Seriously

What is it about?

It is an undeniable fact that legal norms are ‘temporal entities’. They are, in fact, entities that have a temporal duration: they exist in time. They may come into being through a specific legal provision or through an historical process by custom. In the same way, they may disappear at a certain moment through a specific act of derogation or a repeal determined by the meta-rules of the legal system, or through disuse. Although analysis of the reality of legal norms has paid close attention to the temporal dimension, the spatial dimension of legal norms has generally been ignored. It is precisely with this spatial dimension of legal norms that this article is concerned. In particular, in what follows we will attempt to answer this question: Are legal norms spatial entities?

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Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We believe that the spatial viewpoint may prove to be a new and fruitful perspective for an approach to the study of norms. Thinking of norms spatially may make it possible to discover new aspects of norms that have hitherto remained hidden. We therefore believe that the spatial dimension of norms warrants more attention than has been given to it by legal philosophers thus far, and we hope that there will be other studies in the future that go more deeply into the questions that we have begun to formulate and discuss in this paper.