Earth Talk: The Ecology of Law

8pm
Tickets £5, £4 concessions

The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune With Nature and Community

Law is often regarded with cautious suspicion: obscure tool for the ‘initiated’ - at best; iron fist stamping life and the commons under the weight of enclosure and commodification - at worst. In this talk - based on his latest book The Ecology of Law, a joint effort with physicist and philosopher Fritjof Capra - law professor Ugo Mattei traces the deep roots of this guarded mistrust in the historical evolution of legal categories and reasoning towards a mechanistic and reductionist paradigm, akin to the science of Bacon and Newton.

Mattei also argues that, while scientific thought has been undergoing a complexity turn since the beginning of the twentieth century, the tendency towards dissection and reductionism is still strong in the legal field. However, a growing mass of experiments around the world have begun rocking the boat of legal thinking and practice, and creatively pushing its boundaries. Mattei sees much promise in these grassroots experiments of legal reclamation by its users (from land and building occupations, to community currencies and community land trusts) and argues that they might just be the tipping point for law’s eventual re-assessment of its place in the world as a servant - rather than a master - to the needs of communities, and to the unfolding of ecological livelihood practices.

Ugo Mattei is Alfred and Hannah Fromm Professor in International Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, Professor of Civil Law at the University of Turin and Academic Coordinator of the International University College of Turin, an international centre for the study of law and the commons. Beyond his academic work, he has also been a prominent advocate of many Italian struggles for the reclamation of the commons. He was amongst the drafters of a landslide referendum that reversed water privatisation in Italy, as well as serving as a consultant to the endeavour of collective self-management of the Teatro Valle, in the heart of Rome, and was President of ABC Napoli, the largest experiment of re-publicised water board in Italy, in the city of Naples. Among his works are both influential academic monographs on comparative law, international law and legal theory, alongside a number of books for the general public, which criticise the public role of the law, and argue for its re-orientation towards the paradigm of the commons. Amongst those are, in English, Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal (co-authored with Laura Nader) and, his latest effort, The Ecology of Law (co-authored with Fritjof Capra).

For more information visit https://www.dartington.org/whats-on/event/?id=157797