Spatializing social and legal norms : street vending in Acapulco, Mexico

Space matters for norms. In everyday life actions are treated differently according to the place where they are performed, and even the physical proximity between two places does not necessarily preclude a degree of normative distance. There is indeed a spatiality which characterizes legal norms as much as social norms, legal practice as much as social practice. Over the past two decades, following the spatial turn in social sciences, a growing literature in Sociology of Law has been concerned with understanding the mutually constitutive intersections between law and space. Challenging the notions of state-based spatiality which are central to Legal Dogmatics, the so-called Legal Geography became a research field of vivid interest. Nevertheless, there still much work to be done on exploring the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of Legal Geography’s insights in the study of norms and normative action. This paper aims to contribute to strengthen the foundations of this relatively new but promising socio-legal field. Departing from empirical evidence concerning street vending regulation in the city of Acapulco, Mexico, this paper illustrates the extent in which this highly controversial social practice is regulated through a dialectics among legal norms, legal practice, and social norms, on the one side; and jurisdictional spaces, spatial zoning, and territorial spaces, on the other side. These categories consist in a triad of conceptual pairs for analyzing the two-way relationship between norms and space.