Powers of Reach

Abstract

Scholars working in the legal geography tradition have consistently argued that there is an important, although often under-explored or even unarticulated, relationship between law and space. They have stressed that, even when the connections between both categories are not always immediately self-evident, space matters to law. In simple analytical terms, this article continues in this spatio-legal tradition by injecting the distinctively geographical register of reach into contemporary modes of socio-legal theorizing. Building on a body of work deploying ideas around reach, the article draws attention to the ways in which legal mobilization orchestrated at a distance serves as a surface of action for pursuing a range of claims, aims and agendas in the pursuit of ends linked to justice. The empirical focus of the article revolves around an aspect of the litigation-driven redress campaign by the South African social movement Khulumani Support Group that draws on the utility of the US legal statute – the Alien Tort Claims Act.