Crossing Fields: Footpaths, Human Rights and our Legal Geographies

Keywords: Human Rights, Place, Landscapes, History, Geographic Theory, Interdisciplinary Studies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 33

Abstract

As we face a series of vexing questions about how to best address climate change, it is important for rights scholars to examine how to update existing human rights principles to better address the range of environmental threats and uncertainties that we collectively face.

Rights historians often study explosive, episodic historical moments when a new rights paradigm emerges. In this project we ask a different question: What happens before a particular right or set of rights is enshrined in law? What happens before a particular right is even imagined as a rallying cry for individuals and social movements?

We also take a different approach: We suggest that there is much to be learned about the formation of rights, not from abstract moral principles or philosophical pronouncements, but from the footpaths that cut swaths through the English countryside, connecting individuals and land, in the medieval and early modern periods.

Understanding the geographies of such connecting paths offers a unique entry point into how the social dialogue of land use coincided with a key transformation, as less formal usage of roads and lands established rights of “way” and forms of “tenure.” These formations are important to reflect on as they may represent a precondition—not just for locating rights within the environment—but for making use of them at all.