Annotation

The idea that natural and climatic factors influence law and the state has a long history, which helps to understand the emergence of legal geography. The article traces the evolution of approaches to this interrelation within social geography and jurisprudence. It shows how geographical determinism in the works of scholars of Antiquity and the Middle Ages gradually gave way to geographical possibilism, and by the end of the 20th century was supplemented by environmentalism and the ideas of the ‘spatial turn’. The article reconstructs the stages of this new discipline’s formation in the scholarly thought of the East and West, from the thinkers of antiquity and the Middle Ages, through the Modern Era and the age of European colonialism, up to the 20th century. It demonstrates how legal positivism hindered the development of this field, and the impetus it gained from expanding its subject matter to include the topics of legal pluralism, social justice, and transnational aspects of law. In the 21st century, despite the lack of a unified approach and methodology, legal geography is emerging as an important interdisciplinary field capable of offering new tools for analyzing and solving complex problems stemming from the interrelation between space and society.