When I tell people I’m doing a master’s in geography and follow it up with “well really it’s a master’s in sports law as well” I get some understandably bemused looks. Sure, we’ve all recognised that geography is no longer just rocks and rivers, it can get to the heart of a range of subjects including economics, anthropology, sociology, politics and ecology, but sports law? That has to be a step too far.

Before looking more specifically at how sports law work can fit within geography, it’s worth first taking a look at the field of legal geography as a whole. Legal geography emerged as an academic field in the late-1980s, as academics within geography noted the “co-constitutive relationship of people, place and law”¹. Early works focused on this interrelationship, exploring how the impacts of law can vary drastically across space and change distinctly at the level of the local. Legal geography can be defined quite simply as a discipline that looks at the interaction between space and law: it can be complex in its nuances and its focuses, but legal geography scholars keep returning to this fundamental question of how and why legal perceptions, experiences and outcomes change across space, and what the wider implications of this might be.

Wesley Pue, a lawyer, saw the rise of legal geography, and verified that the role of geography is invisible to many lawyers, and that work must be done to change this. Pue argued that geographers “bring a considerably more sophisticated conceptualization of ‘law’ and ‘legality'”² to their work than most lawyers and legal scholars do, emphasising the value of looking at the law from a cultural and spatial perspective, broadening the traditionally narrow focus on the word of the law in isolation from its context.

In the following decades, legal geography has expanded rapidly as a discipline. As in many other geographic disciplines, it has splintered off into a whole array of subdivisions. There are far too many to name, but in the interests of showcasing its breadth, work ranges from feminist legal geographies looking at the impacts of changing abortion laws on women in the United States³ to postcolonial legal geographies that explore how indigenous customary practices can help to shape postcolonial law in certain regions⁴.

This brings us to the legal geographies of sports, another niche that has a surprisingly broad level of application and relevance. Sports law is a booming sector in the legal world, covering an array of work from widely applicable areas such as contract and employment law to sports-specific work such as anti-doping and player eligibility. Sports law can often be a very international sector, with players coming from across the world to play in a certain league, countries meeting each other in major championships, and athletes training in different countries and competing across the world. This led to increasing calls for a transnational sports law that could deal with cross-jurisdictional disputes, calls that were somewhat answered in the form of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). The CAS was established in 1984 in Lausanne, Switzerland, and deals with around 300 cases per year across many sports and countries. Challenges and enforcements of CAS awards are determined in accordance with Swiss law.

However, although sports law at the highest level is determined and enforced in Switzerland, there remain questions over whether sports law of various kinds is being implemented fairly and consistently across all jurisdictions. Are UEFA’s financial fair play rules having the same effect on clubs in England as they are in France? Is the WADA Code being used to punish athletes who are doping in Kenya in the same way as in the United States? Will a major championship hosted in Brazil safeguard against match-fixing as vigilantly as one hosted in Australia?

These questions can be answered by sports law to a point in a strictly procedural way. I would argue that looking through a legal geographies lens allows us to get a more nuanced and rounded view of these issues. Legal geographies looks not just at the letter of the law, but at its cultural surroundings, the attitudes of those in charge of implementing it, and the perceptions of those who are bound by it. It looks beyond the law as written on the page and out to the reality that unfolds on a daily basis. This is not to say that the letter of the law is somehow irrelevant: understanding and working within the law as it is codified is essential in dealing with the problems discussed above. But a legal geographies approach to sport provides a valuable recognition that sports law does not exist in a vacuum. The title of this blog refers to the countless grey areas of sporting rules that hover behind the great performances that we see. Focusing on the letter of the law means we at times obscure these shades of grey. Legal geographies can help to reveal them, leading to a greater understanding of integrity in sport and a more level playing field for all.

Footnotes:

1. Bennett, L. and Layard, A. (2015). Legal Geography: Becoming Spatial Detectives. Geography Compass, 9(7), 406-422. ↩︎
2. Pue, W. W. (1990). Wrestling with law: (geographical) specificity vs. (legal) abstraction. Urban Geography, 11(6), 566–585. ↩︎
3. Cuomo, D. and Brickell, K. (2019). Feminist legal geographies. EPA: Economy and Space, 51(5), 1043-1049. ↩︎
4. Merry, S. E. (1988). Legal pluralism. Law & Society Review, 22(5), 869-896. ↩︎