The law is not enough: Seeking the theoretical ‘frontier of urban justice’ via legal tools
本文探讨法律工具在实现城市正义中的局限性，基于对社会服务设施选址的研究，发现即使有强大的法律保护，市场导向的空间政治仍会导致报复性结果，呼吁未来研究明确法律作为社会正义工具的前沿。
This commentary examines the conceptual limits of urban justice through the use of legal tools, both generally and in actually existing neoliberal urban contexts. Our interest emerges from previous research on social service siting in a region with legal tools that seem exceptionally friendly to spatial justice due to limits on exclusionary zoning. Conceptually, such powerful legal levers might be expected to mitigate the generally observed tendency towards revanchism in contexts of urban government devolution. However, even given exceptional legal accommodations, we found a spatially concentrated service landscape, mirroring neoliberal market-led framings of ‘highest and best use’. Using this prior research as a point of departure, we highlight related findings in the broader literature on the use of the law by urban social justice activists. We argue that even maximally powerful legal protections for justice-oriented actors cannot blunt systematic spatio-political dynamics that lead marketised states towards revanchist outcomes. We call for future research which more explicitly charts the specific frontiers of the potential of the law as a tool for social justice.