Trespassing on the Law: Critical legal engineering as a strategy for action research

Abstract

This paper proposes critical legal engineering (CLE) as a new methodology for legal‐geographic action research. While legal geography is on the rise, geographers rarely participate in legal or judicial process, and when they do – for example, as court expert witnesses – they merely respond to the pre‐established agendas of the legal system. I argue that legal geographers’ knowledge on the nature of law and its relations with society is a source of power that could allow them to set legal agendas and pluralise legal discussions. CLE assumes that legal geographers can put forward technical legal arguments, thus using law’s own tools to implement normative agendas implied in critical research. However, CLE demands a dialectical attitude that preserves the contradiction between political ends and legal technology – while pursuing both of them at the same time. As I show, CLE can realise critical agendas in three ways. First, it co‐opts the legitimacy provided by the legal system, lending it to the agendas that are otherwise perceived as “too radical.” Second, elevated by the law these radical agendas may gain greater power to influence political‐economic realities even before the legal outcomes are decided. Finally, CLE draws out of “technical” legal discussions into the heat of the public debate, thus politicising the law. Having developed this methodological proposition in the course of my research on urban movements, I illustrate it with the strategy of Berlin's campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen (DWE), which has crafted a legal argumentation based on Article 15 of the German Constitution to pursue re‐municipalisation (or de‐privatisation) of housing.

Progressive and critical legal geography scholarship

“…Exploring how social and environmental changes influence law and asking how law can influence social and environmental outcomes are tasks core to legal geography research. At the same time, Kusiak (2021) has also called for legal geography scholars to accelerate the progressive agenda that characterises much of their critical research.…”

Towards a Radical Housing Responsibility

“…First, our discussion is informed by the initiative Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co (hereafter: DWCE) and their 2021 campaign to socialize the housing stock of large corporate landlords in Berlin. 3 DWCE has been widely discussed and celebrated for taking on the legal foundations of private capital (Kusiak, 2021;Metzger, 2021;Richter & Humphry, 2021). While we do not want to rehearse these arguments here, we are interested in learning from the initiative about how a radical housing responsibility can take shape in legal practice.…”

Territorialized Commons and Social Movements: Legal Appropriations of Collective Spaces in Berlin and Santiago de Chile

“…as the idea of legal hacking cannot be looked at without its historical basis of propertization and its implementation through extrajudicial and later judicial force). At the other end of the spectrum, legality is strategically embraced as a form of achieving credibility and legitimacy toward the public (e.g., Kusiak, 2021) as well as a tool to promote long-term stability and security within the commoning initiative (framed as "legal hacking" in the context of Mietshäuser Syndikat, see Barthel, 2020, see also case study on ExRotaprint). Moreover, the question remains what kind of legal property formats are available and chosen by the commoners-and with what kind of legal ramifications for the commoners and implications for movement dynamics.…”