Chapter 4 advances a transformative theory of territorialization by challenging the deep-rooted assumption that legal authority is spatially organized through fixed, contiguous, and mutually exclusive state territories. It argues that this assumption is not a natural fact of international legal order but the product of an inherited cartographic theory as practice. The chapter traces how this worldview emerged from early modern cartographic science and the geometric legacies of Brunelleschi, Copernicus, and Descartes, whose techniques compressed the Earth into a singular, divisible object. Over time, this image became embedded in legal doctrine.

In response, the chapter develops the concept of juriscapes. Whereas jurisdictions depict authority as a bounded, planar geometry, juriscapes capture the textured, overlapping, and trans-territorial formations through which legal rule is produced in practice. Juriscapes thus complement, rather than supplant, jurisdictions. They reveal what the geometric template of jurisdiction cannot – how legal authority thickens or thins, stretches or fractures, according to the material practices, institutional logics, and spatial continuities and discontinuities that shape territorial rule.

Reimagining territorialization through juriscapes widens the discipline’s circumference of vision, allowing international lawyers to apprehend a fuller spectrum of spatial practices that define global legal rule today.