The lawyer as mapmaker and the spatial turn in jurisprudence

Abstract

South African legal culture is characterised by formalist error. The transformative project calls for different intellectual tools and approaches to argumentation in law. The spatial turn, in law and the broader humanities, possibly presents new ways of thinking in the form of cognitive mapping and mapping loss. Legal rules and legal culture, over time, play an important role in how spaces are regulated and constituted. If legal education in South Africa has spatial justice as its aim, an acknowledgement of the palimpsestic nature of law and space in South Africa is required. The spatial turn presents an awakening to the relationship between space and time and can be situated at various stages of the twentieth century in philosophy, literature, art and other disciplines in the humanities. In this contribution, I am concerned with what the spatial turn could possibly mean in the context of legal education and for jurisprudence.