Global Law Futures Seminar Series: Can Modern Law Be Sustainable?
Location:
Moot Court Room
Date/time
Fri 26 January 2024
16:00-17:15
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
Prof Dr Ralf Michaels, Director of the Max Planck Institute for International and Comparative Law, Hamburg, will deliver a seminar titled "Can Modern Law be Sustainable?"
Our everyday way of life is governed by private law. This way of life – a life based on extraction, trade, consumption, waste – is unsustainable. This must have implications for private law, but these implications are, however, rarely scrutinized – at least in this generality, at least fundamentally. Prof Michaels argues that modern private law is paradigmatically incapable of sustainability, and public law is not, as it is in other cases, a solution. Our hope, if any, lies in a radical rethinking of private law.
About the speaker
Prof Ralf Michaels is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany, Chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University in London, and Professor of Law at Hamburg University. He is a widely published scholar of private international law, comparative law, and legal theory; his current research focuses on decolonial comparative law, regulatory conflicts, and theoretical foundations of private international law and global legal plurality, and, more recently, sustainability and law.