Running with the land: legal-historical imagination and the spaces of modernity

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, rural upstate New York was the site of a series of sometimes violent tenant uprisings known as the 'A nti-rent Wars'. The objective of tenants was to dismantle massive landholdi ngs, some of which, such as the Manor of Rensselaerwyck, dated from the 162 0s. Though tenant opposition took many forms, one crucial component was lit igation and the practice of legal argument. This paper uses ideas of the pr oduction of space associated with Henri Lefebvre in presenting a reinterpre tation of these events. After giving a brief account of the genealogy of Re nsselaerwyck as a legal space, the historical arguments expressed in and ma de possible by legal discourse in a series of legal cases are analysed. One of the central issues in these cases was whether Rensselaerwyck represente d an illegitimate survival of feudal spatiality in New York or whether the legal foundation of social space here could be assimilated to more modem le gal forms. Legal argument in these cases is a social practice by which part isans attempt to produce (or reproduce) social space through the strategic interpretation of fines of continuity (or discontinuity) of the legal meani ng of space encoded in rival conceptions of property. (C) 2001 Academic Pre ss.