Lawyering Landscapes: Lawyers as Constituents of Landscape

Landscape Research, Vol. 30, No. 3, 379 – 393, July 2005

Lawyering Landscapes: Lawyers as Constituents of Landscape DEBORAH G. MARTIN & ALEXANDER SCHERR

ABSTRACT Landscape and law cross-influence each other. Legal rules shape landscapes, while landscapes shape the culture from which rules emerge. In describing this interplay, landscape can seem passive, as a canvas on which laws paint visions of society; or active, as a matrix for the creation of law and culture. An alternative view is suggested: landscapes are opportunities for action, fields within which individuals interact with context in a mutually adaptive relationship. Lawyers are specialized constituents of this adaptation. Lawyers’ acts and practices help to constitute the adaptations that shape a given landscape. A teaching module in which it was sought to prompt law students to become aware of the adaptive role of lawyering in landscape is described. The results suggest useful theoretical and methodological insights into landscape as a field of human activity, and the need for further study of lawyering as a force in the construction of landscape. KEY WORDS: Landscape, lawyering, action, constructing landscape

Introduction In this paper, we consider the interconnections between law and landscape by assessing the actions of lawyers as constituents of landscape. We theorize that lawyers’ actions constitute and simultaneously are constituted by particular landscapes. We assess lawyers as a group that, like other professionals, have a specialized ability to shape and be shaped by landscapes. Schein (1997) suggests that legal frameworks such as zoning and property rights form part of the discourses that shape and embed landscapes. We suggest that lawyers enact those frameworks through the activities of lawyering: whether assessing and counselling decisions, or engaging in the shaping of behaviour through consent or through disputing. We describe a case study in which we asked law students to consider landscapes, the laws that influenced them and the behaviours of lawyers in constituting them. We explore how these students assessed the practice of lawyering as a form of public citizenship, and how they reacted to their prospective roles in using the power of the state both to challenge and to reinforce dominant socio-spatial relations.

Correspondence Address: Deborah G. Martin, School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610, USA. Email: [email protected] ISSN 0142-6397 Print/1469-9710 Online/05/030379-15 ª 2005 Landscape Research Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/01426390500165450

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D. G. Martin & A. Scherr

We first describe the concept of landscape, and examine the relationship between the law and landscape. Here, we outline geographical research on legal frameworks shaping landscapes, and the process through which landscapes are constituted within dominant discourses and through individual action. We describe lawyering as an example of individual action with the potential to transform landscapes. We assess how students came to view landscape as an opportunity for lawyering, and describe their ambivalent awareness of the dynamic relationship between their practices as individuals and the landscape within which they are situated. From this, we offer tentative conclusions about a view of landscape as a dynamic occasion for individual action. We also outline a research agenda for further examination of lawyering behaviour as a conduit for the dynamic interaction of law and landscape. Finally, we point to the importance of geographical awareness in professional practices. Landscapes and Geographical Considerations of Law’s Spatial Affects In this paper, we focus on how awareness of and attention to space shapes (and is shaped by) lawyers’ practices, or ‘lawyering’. We use the more specific concept of landscape, however, to emphasize the embeddedness of lawyers, lawyering, and all actions within a ‘scene’ of socio-spatial relations. In doing so, we draw upon Blomley’s characterization of landscape as ‘‘both ‘site’ and ‘sight’’’ Blomley (1998, p. 574). Olwig argues that ‘‘landscape . . . need not be understood as being either territory or scenery; it can also be conceived as a nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity, a contested territory’’ (1996, pp. 630 – 631). Indeed, Olwig (1996) aims to reincorporate landscape studies in contemporary geographical research on socio-spatial relations and human – environment interactions. In doing so, he argues for the centrality of legal frameworks for understanding the meaning of landscape: ‘‘The early concept of Landschaft was, of course, precisely an expression of human law and legal institutions’’ (Olwig, 1996, p. 644). In turn, we argue that attention to lawyering itself reveals the ways in which lawyers and their clients use law to reinforce or challenge the socio-spatial relations that are inscribed in and enabled by particular landscapes. Geographers have already investigated specific laws or legal decisions and their impacts on space (see, for example, Marston, 2002; Mitchell, 1996b, 1997, 2003). We propose to extend this attention to law’s impacts on and in the landscape through examination of the routine activities of standard legal practice. In the last 10 years or so, geographers have explored the ways that legal frameworks, particularly those governing the use of public space, work to shape landscapes by restricting access to space by some people. For example, Mitchell (1995, 1997) has illustrated how laws designed to maintain public order and cleanliness have in effect legislated the homeless out of space. Through a focus on public safety, laws restrict the actions that homelessness necessitates—such as urinating or defecating, sleeping or merely spending long periods of time in public space. These laws essentially render public space accessible only to some persons; those who already enjoy full access to and benefits of private spaces (such as homes, restaurants and the like) through their economic standing. Thus, ‘public space’

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becomes exclusionary rather than a common ground for all persons, and the landscapes of public spaces are to some degree ‘cleansed’ of social difference. Further, Marston (2002) points to how legal limits on actions or speech in public space may work to favour public cultural expression by some groups more than others. Marston argues that because the organizers of New York City’s St Patrick’s Day parade can exclude some participants (specifically, a gay and lesbian IrishAmerican group), the parade functions not only to express Irish-American identity, but to maintain and define it. The rights of all groups to equal public speech, therefore, are mediated by the time – space in which speech occurs (also see Mitchell, 2003). While Marston (2002) and Mitchell (1995, 1997, 2003) illustrate the ways that laws shape episodic (non-continuous) uses of space, laws regulating property give landscapes a concreteness by establishing relatively permanent or fixed uses in particular spaces. Zoning, for example, establishes areas that are exclusively or predominantly residential, commercial, industrial, and so on. Such laws help to establish built landscapes as ‘scenes’ that, while perhaps appearing devoid of political significance and social actors, are in fact fully imbued with power relations. Power relations are evident in studies of the creation of a suburb of Lexington, Kentucky and Chinatown in Vancouver (Anderson, 1991; Schein, 1997). Schein argues: ‘‘most landscapes in the US are the result of countless individual, independent, self-interested decisions . . . Each seemingly individual decision behind any particular US landscape is embedded within a discourse’’ (1997, p. 663). The discourse to which Schein refers includes legal frameworks such as zoning laws, economic systems and consumption patterns, and community associations that maintain social networks and cultural norms. Using the example of Ashland Park, Kentucky, Schein illustrates how economic growth, property and zoning laws, historic preservation and neighbourhood community identity are all frameworks that supported the development of, and continue to define, Ashland Park’s landscape. Similarly, Anderson (1991) argues that legal structures—including federal laws governing citizenship and immigration, and municipal zoning laws—shaped the establishment and maintenance of a distinct ‘Chinatown’ in Vancouver. Yet at the same time, through their actions and negotiations with the dominant society, Chinese Vancouverites were also instrumental in defining and maintaining Chinatown as a distinct commercial, residential and, ultimately, tourist landscape. Both of these cases illustrate the dialectic of individual action and socio-cultural discourses as producers of the cultural landscape. We build on this scholarship towards a separate idea: landscapes are opportunities, or fields, for action. If one sees landscape solely as a physical object, or an inert backdrop for unrelated activity, the idea of landscape as ‘opportunity’ seems counterintuitive. Yet landscape, and particularly cultural landscapes, act as fields within and through which action occurs: ‘scenes’, in both theoretical and metaphorical senses. Blomley reminds us (1998, p. 574) that landscapes function not just as backdrops—‘sights’ as he call them— but also as ‘sites’: settings, or context. We suggest that these sites consist of the combined actions of individuals enacting social, political, cultural and (for our purposes especially) legal agendas. Individuals act within landscapes, and their actions constitute not only what happens

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in that landscape (landscape as ‘site’) but also how we see that landscape (landscape as ‘sight’). Thinking of landscapes as opportunities for action requires viewing such scenes as forms of activity, not as passive receptacles for human behaviour. Indeed, Mitchell argues that landscapes are ‘‘enacted in the process of struggle’’ (1996a, p. 32, quoted in Blomley, 1998, p. 580), and that they are simultaneously always being produced. Landscapes are not enacted once and then remain fixed. They may include the built environment, but they are constantly ‘‘in a state of becoming’’ (Mitchell, 1996a, p. 30, quoted in Blomley, 1998, p. 580). Given this constant evolution, landscapes offer individuals pervasive opportunities for action and reaction. Landscapes situate individual actions within their social, cultural, economic and political context: the cultural landscape exists as a crucial point in and of power, as a place where action can contribute to, as well as be constricted by, the ideals that cohere the discursive network. Through the landscape, the human agent is both object and subject. (Schein, 1997, p. 676) Schein conceives individual decisions and actions as working within and shaping the future constellation of landscapes. His reference to individuals as both objects and subjects demands further theorization of the role of individuals in the continuous process of ‘becoming’ that characterizes landscapes (Mitchell, 1996a, p. 30, in Blomley, 1998, p. 580). Individuals do not operate outside of the structures and discourses that situate and constrain them; but so, too, are structures and discourses created and shaped by ‘countless’ individuals (Schein, 1997, p. 676). Foucault (1979) characterizes individuals as parts of systems—of power, of knowledge—that operate in mutually constitutive fashion. Nonetheless, he holds a place for alternative actions (which might be called resistance) despite or within dominant discourses (Foucault, 1993; Hacking, 1986). Using this notion of systems of power and knowledge, we can conceptualize actions as woven within fields of discourse. These discourses also permeate landscapes which consist in turn of actions which express those discourses (Schein, 1997). The case of anti-homeless laws (Mitchell, 1995, 1997) illustrates interwoven discourses and actions. Laws limiting loitering and solicitation and other related actions draw upon discourses of safety and security, while the notion of public space derives from concerns for equality, a discourse embodied in the fundamental law of the US and other countries. The discourse on health, safety and security modifies and limits the discourse of equal access; but the former does not overcome the latter. Rather, by forbidding certain actions in certain (public) places, the relevant law at least nominally assures equal access. While restricting the access of individuals who commit ‘unwanted’ actions (e.g. public defecation), the laws and their underlying discourse seek to protect and celebrate access as a public good. Anti-homeless laws also illustrate how landscapes of difference—of haves and have-nots—shape individual experiences (e.g. of discomfort) and assumptions (e.g. free access to ‘public’ space). Specific laws embody public policies by integrating and balancing competing discourses and values, equitably or inequitably. This integration in turn becomes the landscape from which further experiences emerge.


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Individual action constitutes a key theoretical component of our view of landscape as occasion for action. We conceive of individual action as a filter and conduit for dominant (or dissident) discourses, in which the actor both influences and is influenced by the discourses embodied in landscape.1 In stressing the individual, we accept and even celebrate the importance of articulating dominant discourses, and of critically assessing their content and power. But we also view individual action as data with its own value and interpretive significance. Individual action serves as the medium through which landscape adapts itself. The actions of an individual acting through landscape may embody one, some, or even all of the forces operating within that landscape. A given individual’s actions may even accommodate conflicting discourses, some dominant, some dissident, and some perhaps barely emergent. An individual may act ‘smoothly’ within landscape, that is, consistently with the dominant discourse, or ‘roughly’, that is, in conflict with the prevailing discourse (and in harmony with a dissident impulse). Indeed, individual action may occur in smooth or rough relationship with the individual’s own intentions. Finally, individuals may have differing degrees of awareness of the relationship between their actions and the forces at work in the landscape. Both individual action and the degrees of awareness and intention that attend action constitute valuable and separable empirical data. This theoretical emphasis on the individual also has some distinct methodological by-products. For example, actions by both high- and low-status actors have equivalent significance and offer equivalent opportunities for study. To be sure, actors of different status may have different effects on the becoming of landscapes, because of the differing discursive (and material) status of the actors. Within urban studies, for example, regime theory highlights the importance of powerful individuals and institutions in shaping particular landscapes (Logan & Molotch, 1987). Regime theory points to the role of elites such as business owners, corporate leaders and newspaper publishers in supporting, shaping and otherwise guiding urban economic growth and related planning policies. Of similar methodological interest is the distinction between unique, even idiosyncratic, behaviour on the one hand and routine, habitual behaviour on the other. Both offer occasions for study. The former provides chances to test the limits on the influence of individuals on landscape as such, and may often offer examples of experimental efforts to harmonize conflicting discourses. The latter offers chances to explore the effects of aggregated, largely identical behaviours within landscapes. Indeed, to the extent that routine behaviour occurs across groups of individuals, it may suggest that a particular approach to conflicting discourse has achieved a stable status with functional value both for the individual and for the group in which the routine behaviour occurs. Lawyers in Landscapes The activities of lawyers through landscape offer especially useful opportunities to explore these themes. Lawyers implement and mediate the law’s messages into the choices and opportunities presented by their clients. To the extent that law enacts prevailing discourses, the act of lawyering serves as a medium through which that discourse becomes prevalent in landscape. Moreover, lawyers as a professional

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community rely extensively on routine habit and practice; studying lawyering practices (and lawyer awareness of the value and suitability of those practices) gives us opportunities to assess the strength of professional communities in the creation of landscapes. Finally, lawyers have a specialized status, both culturally and legally. In our usage, ‘lawyering’ denotes the mental process or method used to handle the concerns on which lawyers are called to work (Scherr, 2002, p. 217). Lawyering in this sense constitutes a form of problem solving. The uniqueness of the lawyer’s task lies in the use of law as a primary context and tool with which to solve the problem. At the same time, lawyers routinely face situations in which other non-legal influences (allocations of power, psychic or relational forces, availability of resources) strongly influence and even control the lawyer’s work (Scherr, 2002, pp. 229 – 261). All lawyers are called upon to mediate the discourse of law into these other non-legal dynamics. Lawyers also have specialized status as public actors. They have a publicly delegated monopoly on ‘the practice of law’. Their tools as lawyers include the texts and meanings of the law, and the processes associated with legal outcomes, both of which have essentially public sources. Their actions almost always influence others, from clients to transactional partners to disputing opponents, creating small, situational sub-communities of mutual influence. Finally, lawyers often constitute the very public, institutional actors whose judgments and assessments shape and constitute state action within landscape; in these situations, actions by lawyers are the actions of the state in relation to landscape. It may or may not be possible to argue that at least some lawyers are wholly private. But in the routine sense, lawyers are public actors; for our purposes, this public stature offers unique chances to study the effects of routine professional behaviour within landscapes. In a number of senses, lawyers thus act as constituents of landscape. Laws themselves shape landscapes, either directly (e.g. through zoning or environmental regulation) or indirectly (e.g. through private property transactions or regulation of behaviour in public space). What lawyers do in implementing these rules through practical decision making serves to constitute the resulting landscape. Lawyering behaviour often occurs through habit or routinized, unwritten professional practice. These practices usually reflect pragmatic adjustments to the non-legal realities presented by repetitive, specialized work. Lawyers thus act as constituents in the active sense: persons whose actions create landscapes. But they also serve as constituents in the sense of citizens/residents: individuals living within landscape and influenced by the interplay of discourses which landscape embodies. What distinguishes lawyers as constituents (in both senses) is their special sensitivity to legal discourse, and the potential power of their attitudes and routine practices on the shape of landscapes. In order to explore this constituent role of lawyers, we introduced a class of law students to the concept of ‘landscape’ and evidence about how laws shape everyday landscapes. Constituent Awareness In this section, we describe the class through which we sought to convey to law students a sense of their constituency in landscape. After briefly reviewing the course and the course module, we describe and assess how students identified and


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interpreted their constituent role. Elsewhere, we have discussed the ethical dimensions of this exercise, focusing on how students expressed conflicting discourses through a rhetoric of personal values (Martin & Scherr, 2004).2 Here, we seek to assess how students came to an appreciation of their constituent role, and through that assessment, to develop further insight into the interaction between individual action and landscape. Course and Course Module The Public Interest Practicum (PIP) at the University of Georgia Law School trains about 20 law students through three different teaching modes: seminar, client service and shared community projects. The year-long seminar combines information and simulated practice in law and lawyering with an 18-week exploration of a primary theme or themes.3 Atypically for a law-school class, the seminar uses a wide range of teaching tools, exploring primary legal sources alongside the arts (e.g. novels, poetry, history and film) and various social sciences (including the disciplines of anthropology, economics, geography, psychology and sociology). The Practicum focuses primarily on the law relevant to the needs of the poor, a service mission. The course’s pedagogical goals thus rest on an assumption of service. A core goal of the class is to encourage students to explore and understand the public dimensions of their work as lawyers. To a large extent, this goal should assure student responsiveness to discourse about their role with landscape, particularly if viewing landscape as a form of action within dominant political and social discourses. At the same time, a focus on service and on the public nature of lawyering itself constitutes dissident discourse within legal education. Over 80% of law graduates become private practitioners, engaged in profit-making representation of individuals and businesses. Legal education responds to a strong imperative to train and to rank graduates for entry into private practice. Thus, to a nearly equivalent extent, the messages of service and of public awareness run across the grain of law students’ experiences outside the classroom. The ‘racialized landscapes’ teaching module represented a 5 – 6-class segment of the Practicum, occurring just past the middle of 28 classes. We conceived of the course as a way to use the tools of cultural geography to prompt law students to assess racial problems in their immediate community. The module occurred in three phases: introductory tools and concepts; student observation and reporting; and assessment of institutional and legal explanations for the observations.4 The first teaching phase was to introduce students to the project, and to provide them with a framework for assessing their observations using some of the conceptual models of geography as well as the methods of demographic analysis. The second phase involved empirical observation by the students, along with student reports on those observations. Students were to be divided into separate smaller groups; we were to assign each group to a particular transect for field observation, with instructions. We would require each group to travel each transect, noting the changes in neighbourhoods along the route, and then each group would be required to choose two neighbourhoods and to walk through them slowly, observing that neighbourhood more carefully. (Throughout, students would be asked to record locations for later photographing, which one of us agreed to do

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using a digital camera.) Using both their observations and their photographs, students were to deliver in-class summaries of their observations. Finally, we planned to have students study (through readings and lecture) the mechanics through which legal actors helped to shape neighbourhoods. We hoped to introduce them to the intersections between social attitudes and legal institutions that served to explain some portion of their observations. Through these more conceptual and traditional sources, we hoped to convey how individual attitudes towards race intersected with legal regulation of housing and other land-use policy. Students were encouraged to discuss these intersections in the regularly assigned reflective writing they engaged in later in the semester. Student Ambivalence about Agency The racialized landscape module imposed at least two distinct demands on our students. First, it introduced them to the discipline of cultural geography, requiring them to use both new analytical methods and unfamiliar conceptual frameworks in assessing physical reality. Second, the module asked them to consider a handful of especially divisive topics, including racial division in the distribution of housing, the association between class identity and place of residence, and the pervasiveness of attitudes towards both race and class. We expected these demands to produce open-ended, even passionate discussion about public and systemic influences in landscape, and a willing, even eager anticipation of their role as agents. This seemed especially likely with a group of students already predisposed (by self-selection) to consider dissident messages in the law. Instead, we observed a curious ambivalence in our students: while most acknowledged their future role as agents, many students also qualified and distanced themselves from the potential consequences of their agency, especially with respect to those aspects of their agency that reflected dissidence or divergence from dominant discourses. This ambivalence emerged during three distinct phases of the course module: during observation, during report and during reflection. During observation, students took some time to become comfortable with their role as observers. They seemed especially ill at ease with the use of specific, ostensibly value-neutral criteria as a basis for drawing conclusions about racial influences in the distribution of housing. The most forceful objection related to stereotyping: the assertion that looking at housing with racial realities firmly in mind resulted in looking for racially disparate housing patterns, and in assumptions about individuals based on racially charged symbols. At the same time, as students completed their observations, we noted an increasing excitement about and connection with the task of observing, and with the insights that emerged from observation. For individuals, there were conscious flashes of insight and even surprise at unexpected diversions from their own assumptions: a well-tended mobile home park, or a Baptist church bordered by a liquor store and a gas station. Within observing groups, strong debate occurred over interpreting and assigning importance to particular observations. Students argued over the ‘safety’ of neighbourhoods; over which neighbourhoods were ‘nice’ or which houses were ‘big’; and over what kinds of people lived in those neighbourhoods. The experience of speculative, even


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contentious observation contrasted with and to some extent offset objections to the racial themes underlying the exercise.5 During reporting, students displayed a related ambivalence about how to present what they observed. Many teams focused narrowly and specifically on physical objects, especially on proxy objects: statuary, flags, outdoor furniture, street signs. Others made a point of looking for startling contrasts and juxtapositions, such as those just mentioned. Only a handful offered detailed analyses or explanations for their observations. As we note elsewhere, the classroom discussions focused more on the personal values of the observing teams, especially on whether certain observations reflected personal bias in the observing groups. No group sought to explain the observed world in terms that stressed legal or governmental influences, despite ample instances of such influence: deciding where to situate a crosswalk; determining lot sizes or setbacks in particular neighbourhoods; placing street signs in particular locations. We believe that this silence on the role of the law and the state, and the preference for discussions focused on personal values, reflects another aspect of student ambivalence over the law’s role, and their own, in the construction of landscapes.6 Finally, this ambivalence towards lawyering in landscape emerged during student written reflection on the project.7 Many journals presented a fairly detached notion of agency. For example, discussing an early exercise in mental mapping, one student wrote: In those classes, I learned a lot about race. I was surprised to see how banks had ‘redlined’ certain areas which have affected the way our communities are racially made up today. Other students noted the limitations of their own insight: none of us listed the segregated areas of our towns although we did list every other detail.. . . these areas of my town would have been an oversight to me. Some began to consider how to change themselves in response to concerns over their own reactions: As I have distanced myself from that visceral reaction . . . I have come to reevaluate [it] and wonder if it was at all appropriate. Of course, the question then becomes, if it is not an appropriate reaction, how can it be changed, if that is possible at all. These preliminary stirrings of alertness to the influence of discourse on personal action became more pointed and focused for some students: if people make assumptions about us based on the type of neighbourhood or house we live in, then it is a safe bet that nearly everything we do leads someone to presume something about us, whether concerning our race, wealth, or any other quality.

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For other students, this insight extended to speculation about attitudes of state actors: I know [the residents] can to some extent be content with what they have. My thoughts were more that the city/county didn’t give this area the same attention or importance it gives to other areas of Athens-Clarke County. I wondered if it reflected the official impression of this area. For at least one student, the increased awareness prompted insight into the difference between passive and active engagement in the construction of landscape: I had always been one of those who just thought it was the way things worked out.. . . It is only with this understanding that we can publicly, through service, and privately, through educating the people we talk to, people like my father, help to move our city and those like ours into a place where they will be able to address these problems. No student reflected explicitly on their own role as agents in the landscape, either as lawyers or (perhaps more fundamentally) as citizens. Indeed, one of the few statements of this came from someone who professed no desire to be a lawyer. Referring to some readings which came after the geography exercise,8 this student did not know if [she] would ever be a lawyer or politician, but both professions have more appeal after having read those books . . . I do want to work in and for the community, at least in a volunteer capacity, and knowing the power of those two systems gives me insight as to how big problems can be solved for the oppressed or under represented in a society. At the same time, many students reported having an enhanced sense that their beliefs and attitudes mattered for how they understood the landscape. In turn, over time, that enhanced sense of significance might prompt a more active alertness to the discordance of discourses in a given landscape: It has been an eye-opener to see not only how alike and/or different we are from other students and other people in the communities where we live, but how differently we view things. I truly thought there were some things that can essentially be described/measured objectively, things about which we would all or almost all share opinions, but I have learned that what I thought was completely wrong. I am always amazed when I realize how many different ways people can see the same thing! I like that. Another student described a renewed sense of commitment in the perspectives the project provided: Though nothing I saw or experienced during the project was too surprising, it did take away some of the jaded-ness that two years of poverty law practice (in PIP and [a criminal defense practice]) might have given me.


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Finally, many students commented on the utility of connecting where they lived with where their clients lived, both for the practical bonding it permitted in one-to-one client relations, and for the more general ‘sense of one community’ that many of the students found lacking in their sense of their homes.9 We cannot interpret these reactions as fully conscious, fully engaged commitments to their oncoming role as lawyer agents in landscape. Rather, these reactions appear to us to evidence more intriguing and unsettling aspects of lawyer agency. First, the ambivalence expressed by individuals and the group reveals a developmental reality. These students had not yet become lawyers, and had no reason to feel or to understand the sense of responsibility for consequences that they will assume as lawyers. Students quite naturally assessed the Athens landscape in a more or less detached fashion from the sense of consequences that will become a fundamental feature of their lives as lawyers. They struggled to find an appropriate sense of how much to assume personal responsibility for influencing landscape, especially within the thick and conflicted discourse of race. Second, where students did seek to imagine themselves as consequential actors, they tended either to objectify the landscape as a purely physical reality, or to sublimate conflict in discourse over race, equality and qualitative disparities in shelter into other perceptions and critiques. The use of proxy analysis (‘what does that statue mean?’), and of rhetorical debate over the meanings of particular qualitative descriptors (‘nice’, ‘big’), seems fairly interpretable as a means to absorb and manage the more intractable realities of racism as a force in constructing landscapes, and the role of law in enabling that construction. Transforming societal disputes into value conflict on a personal scale; seeking a settled degree of detachment from the broader effects of individual action; creating proxy objects and manipulating rhetoric as a means of sublimating conflict over conflicting discourse: these seem to us to reflect key aspects of a practising lawyer’s professional agency within landscape. To be sure, these students have not yet completed the transition from non-lawyer to lawyer, and have not yet had the opportunity to develop settled professional habits of dealing with their own role as constituents. We do not suggest that this teaching exercise offers any reliable conclusions about how practising lawyers define and shape their agency; nor do we believe that it offers reliable conclusions about how practice and habit develop within that agency. However, the teaching exercise does illustrate some of the psychic forces at work in the accommodation of dissonant landscapes, especially by those assuming a privileged position of influence. It suggests that conscious awareness of agency may not parallel the actual fact of broader influence. We speculate that student ambivalence over the scope and power of their role as agents must serve a useful psychic function. This ambivalence may permit a functional accommodation of strongly conflicting (and to some extent irreconcilable) discourses about race, class and the distribution of goods. It may also reflect an unwillingness to come to terms with their responsibilities as actors in the public sphere before they emerge from the relative safety of law school, and begin their professional agency. Finally, this ambivalence may serve as a buffer from more self-critical assessments of an individual’s personal racial or class attitudes. At the very least, this group did not assess the possibilities for action or anticipate the role as agents as eagerly or passionately as we had expected.

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Finally, we noted both the usefulness and the difficulty of exposing students to ‘thinking like geographers’. We had hoped to provide students with tools for clearer, or at least more nuanced insight into the role of law in the construction of landscapes. Instead, we found a general unfamiliarity with geographical thinking in their day-to-day and professional lives. We believe that that unfamiliarity hinders the possibilities for more constructive engagement with the idea of agency within and towards landscapes. Conclusion Geographical analyses of landscape highlight their contested nature and mutual constitution with culture (Mitchell, 1996a, 1997; Olwig, 1996; Schein, 1997). Geographers recognize the integral role that individual agents can have in shaping landscapes, through mediation among (often unequal) social groups or resistance to dominant forces of government and capital (Anderson, 1991; Blomley, 1998; Marston, 2002; Mitchell, 1995). Schein situates actions based on ‘‘individual, independent, self-interested decisions’’ (1997, p. 663) within dominant discourses that frame the meaning of those actions—so that an action like buying a house is situated as part of a consumerist discourse. But these analyses of actions within landscapes focus on past actions, rather than possibilities for future action and the ways such actions will shape the continuing development of landscapes. This paper describes a deliberate attempt to empower individual agents with self-awareness about their landscape actions. Measured against a standard of actual empowerment, we acknowledge the limitations of the exercise. However, as a source of insight into the psychic realities of agency, the exercise has some distinctive value. As public-interest law students, the agents presented here have a specialized, even predetermined relationship to the law. These students had selected this course out of an interest in the public aspects of lawyering, and particularly the use of law to advance public interest goals and ideals. These students should have been especially attuned to messages about their public role, and about their agency as a give and take of conflicting discourses. However, the students seemed least interested in connecting what they observed, how they observed, and their own values to the mechanics and opportunities of their own practices as lawyers. When compelled by assignment to note how the law itself might explain what they saw, they did so, but they seemed reluctant to address the extent of their own future agency as lawyers. Even more pointedly, these students seemed reluctant to acknowledge the power of the lawyering role as an influence on landscape. They seemed especially unwilling to link their own values and assumptions to their prospective role as lawyers. Nonetheless, we conclude that the field exercise successfully prompted students to reflect upon their own biases and expectations: an incremental increase in empowerment through an exercise in contentious observation and debate. Students drew upon their reactions to landscapes to make some assessments of their observations. Merely to identify ‘housing’ was insufficient, for example: students had to consider the size, style and upkeep of houses, in addition to nearby land uses, in order to make conclusions about the ‘housing’ they observed. In doing so, students were confronted with their own personal values and expectations within and about


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landscapes. They were also provided with formal data about the inherent power relations visible in and productive of landscapes. The landscapes students observed were, based on the formal knowledge we provided, filled with power, but drained of values. Students had to openly reflect and make explicit their responses to and values about them in the class discussions. Students were thus forced to be active agents in the construction of landscapes through interpreting them in the classroom. Their ambivalent response to this exercise in constituting landscapes may say as much about the complexity of the agency dynamic as it does about the limitations of the exercise itself. Indeed, this exercise in fostering geographical awareness for professionals without geographical training highlights a core challenge of practical agency within landscapes.10 If students refuse to assess and accept their own agency in the landscape, we suspect that their eventual, inevitable engagement will occur without awareness of the conflicting discourses that a careful assessment might highlight. We assume that all lawyers (and indeed all citizens) do in fact act interdependently within landscapes. We believe that acting powerfully but without awareness will perpetuate systemic inequalities already deeply embedded in landscapes. This exercise illustrates the difficulty of training students to act with conscious alertness to these inequalities, and offers strong evidence of the need for useable analytical tools and well-developed conceptual frameworks to foster that alertness. In effect, we see a need for training in geographical awareness for those professionals whose work has distinctive influence within landscapes. Our theoretical model postulates landscape as an opportunity for action, and individual activity as a medium through which landscape creates and re-creates itself. This model assumes that individuals both act within and are acted upon by landscape. The class exercise revealed that the simultaneous experience of intentionally acting and of passively being acted upon creates an uncomfortable and conflicted mental space for the individual. Our students resolved this conflicted mental space into a sort of pragmatic ambivalence. We suspect that that pragmatic ambivalence will follow them into their professional practices as lawyers, although that suspicion deserves further study. If this conclusion holds true, the experience of dynamism for engaged individuals should not resolve easily or neatly into settled harmony with either dominant or dissident discourses. Rather, landscapes are always becoming in the students’—soon to be lawyers’—reactions to them, and in their deployment of legal mechanisms in relation to landscapes. This study strongly suggests the need to integrate both the methods and the content of geographical assessment into other professional training programmes. Provided with these tools, students should more successfully negotiate the opportunities for action in landscapes that contain both deep psychic ambivalence and forcefully constructed moral content. Notes 1 We acknowledge the insights of structuration theory here (Pred, 1984). However, we want to examine the explicit interaction between landscape, individuals and the particular discourse/framework of the law. 2 In focusing on ethics (Martin & Scherr, 2004), we examine how individual discourses of personal values served as the prism through which students processed conflicting influences in landscapes. We consider the spatial understandings of students before, during and after conducting field work on the racialized

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distribution of housing (also described in this paper). In that separate discussion, we analyse how students personalized disputes over spatial patterns through debates and conflicts over personal values, and how they largely avoided assessments of systemic social biases. In effect, students constructed a moral and ethical rhetoric with which to absorb the conflict in discourses about landscapes. For more information on this aspect of our findings, along with a more detailed description of the pedagogical module, see Martin & Scherr (2004). They have included such topics as gendered lawyering, class disparities, consumer transactions, health and mental health, and legalized care-taking (including child custody, elder law and involuntary commitment). During the year we delivered this module; the theme involved racialized lawyering, and students had been asked to read and apply a series of texts focused on the interplay of racism both with primary law and with personal assumptions about racism. Before teaching, we planned out five separate routes (or ‘transects’) through the school’s home city. These transects ran from a single, central location on campus, out to the city borders and backwards along a slightly separate route. At some point during the exercise, many students questioned the racial assumptions underlying the exercise itself, arguing that, in looking for racial conclusions, the exercise (and perhaps even the professors) embodied racist assumptions. This discomfort with the interplay between observing racism and being racist represents in our view another aspect of the ambivalence this teaching module elicited from students. We sought to counteract this silence about the law in the concluding classes of the module, by presenting a series of classes on the role of law and legal rules in designing the landscape, including an historical explanation for the emergence of racially segregated housing, along with a review of recent law review literature focusing on how legal rules serve to reinforce class and racial patterns in the housing market. Practicum students engage in regular self-reflective writing on their experiences in the class, as part of their preparation for more effective self-guidance as a lawyer (Ogilvy, 1996; Scho¨n, 1983). These ‘journals’ occur at pre-determined stages in the semester, about 1/3, 2/3 and at the end of each semester. See Pomerantz (1996) and Greene (1991). The students’ sense of their home spaces was established through an exercise of mental mapping. Martin & Scherr (2004) discuss this process in detail. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing our conclusions in this direction.

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