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.

Critical legal pluralism acknowledges both the multiple sources and forms of law, and their dynamic interaction, within singular geographical spaces at whatever scales they are defined. Challenging conventional constructs of law and jurisdiction, the articles in this themed section draw on the ideas of legal pluralism, justice and spatial conflict to explore the experience, interaction, impact and possibilities of the plurality of laws in particular and diverse geographical contexts. Encompassing a wide‐ranging geographical scope and pluralistic approach to the idea of law, these articles present fresh analyses and novel case studies from Australia, UK, Cambodia, Indonesia, USA, Thailand and Aotearoa New Zealand, which collectively reflect the richly textured and diversely oriented work of legal geographers. They raise important and challenging questions about law as a living materiality and about place as a legal agent.

The Nagoya Protocol encourages academics, government bureaucrats, and traditional owners to look at how customary law might be utilised within state law frameworks to improve and resolve “access and benefit‐sharing” processes. This paper examines and reviews legal, anthropological, and historical texts relating to biodiversity and associated knowledge to explore Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples’ customary laws and governance. Understanding the broader place of Indigenous customs, laws, and belief, as sitting on the oral–written continuum and expressed through the Dreaming, provides the foundation for understanding Indigenous customary laws as they relate to plants and animals. The paper highlights, through examples, that plants and animals may be regarded as totemic species, that are rights controlled and/or relational to specific individuals or families. Looking towards native title, community protocols and a “competent cultural authority,” the paper seeks out tools which might expand the regulatory toolbox and help connect Indigenous law and state law relating to Indigenous knowledge and totemic species.

Sanjiang National Nature Reserve (NNR) is a state-owned natural wetland in China that has suffered severe degradation due to cultivation and wetland reclamation by farmers. As a consequence, the conversion of cultivated land to wetlands (CCW) was proposed by the government of Heilongjiang province and the United Nations Development Programme/Global Environment Facility (UNDP/GEF) project team in 2007. We suggest that voluntary participation in the CCW could be an important tool for accomplishing the integrated objectives of wetland conservation and local development. The purpose of this study was to examine the main factors that influence farmers' willingness to participate in the CCW through a field investigation and a questionnaire. Based on the data from our questionnaire, which provided an effective sample of 310 households in 11 villages, the influencing factors of farmers' willingness to participate were analyzed through binary logistic regression analyses. It was concluded that age, education, the amount of cultivated land, geographical location, and the perceived benefits and risks were important factors for participation. Furthermore, suggestions for improving the wetland compensation system and providing alternative livelihoods are proposed to strengthen participation.

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