Search

Residents living in close proximity to contaminated sites may experience adverse effects from financial losses and property devaluation, leading to poor mental health and physical illnesses—effects that may require compensation. The most common legal process of seeking compensation is the toxic tort—litigation pressed on the basis that contamination has harmed the victims. Several recent toxic tort class actions in Australia brought by residents living in areas affected by contamination from per‐ and poly‐fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exemplify that process. Two such actions, those at Williamtown and Richmond, provide an opportunity to explore how toxic torts currently function as a means to secure compensation, whether they mitigate the harms of the contamination and considering how spatio‐legal manoeuvres may shape the litigation. In this article, we use a legal geography approach to analyse how plaintiffs' bodies, litigants' properties, and the state are constructed and represented by parties involved in these toxic torts. Legal geographers contend that examining the spatio‐legal manoeuvres made via litigation can make visible the effects of legal action on those involved and draw out how the law and its instruments may shape places and communities. Toxic tort class actions have allowed those affected by the contamination to be heard and receive some compensation. However, we argue that they do little to alleviate plaintiffs' concerns about the effects of contamination on their health, properties, and the environment. The findings have significance given that torts will likely play an increasingly prominent role in dealing with such challenges. This article examines a recent series of toxic tort class actions brought by residents living in areas affected by contamination from per‐ and poly‐fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in New South Wales, Australia. It explores in particular how the torts function as a form of compensation for those affected by the contamination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the links between contaminated sites and adverse effects on human health and well‐being are being increasingly recognised, some argue that the magnitude of the health problem is inadequately addressed because it is largely invisible. Health geographies literature has sought to highlight this invisibility by focusing on the link between contaminated sites and health. This study adds to health geographies by presenting unique insights into the geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effect of environmental contamination on health and well‐being. It analyses a sample of residents (n = 485) living near 13 contaminated sites across Australia. Ordinal logistic regression analysis of closed‐format survey questions was combined with coding of open‐ended survey questions to reveal the geography of residents' worry about contamination from nearby sites. First, the study explores some of the main relationships between residents, their environs, and contaminants from nearby source sites, which determines their levels of worry: residents' demographics, residents' proximity to sites, contaminant boundaries and borders, and type of contaminant. Second, the study investigates how worry affects residents' health and well‐being, ranging from effects on their personal functioning through to their sense of ontological security, which depends in part upon their perceptions of contaminants' impacts. Despite having identified a range of diverse and negative effects of worry about contamination on residents, we found that worry for contamination can also prompt coping strategies and problem‐solving, reinforcing the need for more research on this subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we focus on the deployment of certain techniques that are central to municipal law’s attempt to impose order on the city, namely, development control, zoning, and change of use regulation. Drawing on the notion of inter-legality, we argue that such practices can never be consistent or universal, and instead need to be sufficiently pliable to recognise the diversity of legal norms, assumptions and practices evident in a multicultural city. We demonstrate this with reference to the resolution of urban land-use conflict in Sydney (Australia) showing how planning decisions have need to demonstrate flexibility within the law to achieve outcomes that are sensitive to local contingency and informed by notions of spatial justice. In conclusion we suggest that attempts to make municipal law more consistent or unified are problematic given situated discretion is required to produce cities more open to difference and diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law is a powerful influence on people and place. Law both creates and is created by the relationship between people and place, although it rarely acknowledges this. Law frequently operates as if space does not matter. Law and legal processes, therefore, deserve greater attention from geographers. Legal geography is an emerging field of inquiry that facilitates much-needed attention to the interrelationships among the environment, people and social institutions, including formal laws but also informal rules, norms and lore. Legal geographers seek to make the invisible visible: to bring the law into the frame of geography, and space and place into focus for the law. Both critical and applied in approach, legal geography offers descriptive, analytical and normative insight into economics, justice, property, power, geopolitics, governance and scale. As such it can enrich most areas of geographic inquiry as well as contribute to current policy debates about the regulation of space and place. Legal geography is a way for enlarged appreciations of relationality, materiality, multiscalarity and agency to be used to interrogate and reform the law. This introduction to a special 'themed paper' section of Geographical Research provides a window on legal geography scholarship, including its history, contribution and ambition. The papers in the collection explore issues grounded in the legal geographies paradigm, variously analysing matters empirically detailed while engaging in broader, theoretical debates and using both Australian and international case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines 284 resident submissions to sex premises planning processes, and a survey of 401 residents living near sex premises in New South Wales, Australia, to investigate resident concerns about the effect of sex premises on local environs, and how these concerns inform resident views on the spatial ordering of sex premises. The investigation found that there was a discrepancy between the views of the broader residential population and the views of participants in planning processes. The investigation suggests that geographers need to consider more deeply the connections between residents, planning and the geographies of this controversial land use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]