Event(ful) spaces of organised legal encounter: From a client consultation competition on domestic violence law in Cambodia

Over the past five years, geographers' engagement in legal observation and/or intervention has begun to gain momentum, with a particular emphasis on the courtroom. Courtrooms are positioned as epicentres of law(yering) in-action, yet their pre-eminence should not deflect from efforts to build a more inclusionary geography of law attendant to other, less high-profile and official, spaces of law. In this paper, I elaborate on this argument by interrogating a client consultation competition (CCC) that I co-organised on domestic violence law with staff and students from a higher education institution in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The paper hones in specifically on the political interface that the CCC event fashioned between myself, the student competitors, and the state. Drawing on participant observation and audio-recordings of the event, in addition to post-competition focus groups I held with students, the paper demonstrates the value of cross-pollinating social geographic work on events and encounter with legal-oriented scholarship in the discipline on spaces and actors of law. Chased within the political, their fusing together permits researchers to widen their horizons beyond the court event and to think creatively about other legal infrastructures in which law and legal practice comes to be known and operationalised. The paper therefore asks that geographers committed to fostering justice not only step inside the courtroom, but also venture into spaces where its future prospects are born.