The territoriality of law: An exploration

Laws, as conceived in this essay, comprise a set of rules enunciated and operated for the purposes of social control.' There are many such sets of rules in operation in all parts of the world, at a great range of spatial scales and in a myriad of contexts. Laws represent a special case of such rules, however, because they are enacted and operated by a particular type of institution—the state. A major feature of the state, and thus of law as against other sets of rules, is that it is, necessarily according to some, a territorial body. The ability to exercise sovereign power within territories is the hallmark of the state, and laws as its means of exercising that power are thus territorial too. The purpose of the present essay is to explore the law-state-territory nexus.