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This handbook provides an expansive and multi-disciplinary interrogation of the spaces and places of law, advancing cutting-edge insights as to the numerous intersections of space, place and law in our lives. We engage relationally in a material world - of space and place - within which we are inter-dependent and reliant, and governed by laws in a dynamic process rarely linear and never fixed. This collection combines contributions from around the world focusing on methodology, embodied experience, legal pluralism, conflict and resistance, non-human and place agency, and covering cross-cutting themes including social (in)equality and environmental justice, sustainability, urban development, Indigenous legal systems, colonialism and property law. A diversity of places and spaces are represented, spanning Australia, Bolivia, Canada, China, France, Fiji, India, Kiribati, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Scholars, students and practitioners will find this a valuable compendium of the breadth and strength of scholarship in space, place and law.

Humans only seem able to function well if our actions are limited by boundaries. History seems to teach us that unconstrained free will is a recipe for disaster; if left to our own devices, we will do whatever we want without much consideration of actual or potential future consequences. This truism - always characterised with noble exceptions - seems to be as accurate at the community level as it is (often) for the individual. And that is why we need boundaries: boundaries set limits, and these limits are meant to achieve, maintain and/or return us to what is perceived to be a desired condition.