Collective Self-Legislation: Reconfiguring Global Legal Education Amid Catastrophic Environmental Degradation

Edinburgh Law School’s ‘Global Law Futures’ seminar series explores questions relating to global law, broadly construed, from transdisciplinary and diverse methodological perspectives. Law in a plural global context requires a radical re-imagining of the practice, study, and theory of legal orthodoxies. This seminar series questions and attempts to push the boundaries of thinking about law. The series will touch on issues such as the space-time of legal imaginaries, the place of law in times of anthropocentric ecological crisis, the relationalities and materialities of law, what it means to decolonise legal thinking in a global context, the meaning of ‘global legal order(s)’, the relationship between law and algorithmic governance, the exploration of decentralised and deformalised legal practices, and many more besides.  

Beginning in January 2024, the seminar series is convened by Amalia Amaya Navarro, Gail Lythgoe, and Veronica Ruiz Abou-Nigm, collaborating with Nehal Bhuta, Deval Desai, Simone Lamont-Black. The series is supported by the Edinburgh Centre for International Global Law and the Edinburgh Centre for Legal Theory.

About this event

Global law programs take largely for granted that law is about the self-legislation of human collectives located in a stable natural environment rendered available for the realization of human ends. Catastrophic environmental degradation calls for a critical reconfiguration of collective self-legislation, a reconfiguration that, amongst others, undoes the doctrinal split between private law and public law, on the one hand, and acknowledges the primacy of obligation over rights, on the other. Initiatives to ecologize property and to resocialize corporations build on these two transformations of our legal and political imaginary, intimating a novel concept of lawmaking as decentered self-legislation by collectives composed of humans and other-than-humans, which, joined together in relations of mutual dependency, strive to realize more-than-human ends: geopolicies. The neologism’s Greek root, geos, suggests that global law programs must become terrestrial if their claim to approach law globally is to be credible and relevant as a response to the Anthropocene.

About the Speaker 

Hans Lindahl holds a chair of global law at the Law School of Queen Mary University of London. He is also emeritus chair of philosophy of law at Tilburg University, the Netherland. He obtained law and philosophy degrees at the Universidad Javeriana, in Bogotá, Colombia, before taking a doctorate at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the University of Louvain (Belgium) in 1994. His primary areas of research are legal and political philosophy. Lindahl has published numerous articles in these fields. His monograph, Fault Lines of Globalization: Legal Order and the Politics of A-Legality, was published with Oxford University Press in 2013 (Italian and Spanish translations; a Japanese translation forthcoming in 2025). A follow-up monograph, Authority and the Globalisation of Inclusion and Exclusion, has been published with Cambridge University Press in 2018 (Portuguese and Spanish translations). His current research explores how the challenges raised by the so-called Anthropocene demand reconsidering key features of the ways in which modern legal and political philosophy have conceptualized legal order. This project draws on and radicalizes his earlier research on issues germane to globalization processes, such as the concept of legal order in a global setting; a politics of boundary-setting alternative to both cosmopolitanism and communitarianism; transformations of legal authority and political representation. In dealing with these topics Lindahl draws on (post-)phenomenology and theories of collective action of analytical provenance, while also seeking to do justice to the nitty-gritty of positive law.

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