Law legitimizes private corporate power and its role in environmental degradation and human rights abuses. It sustains deeply unequal governance patterns and institutional structures which reinforce exclusions along gender, race and other identity markers, suppressing various forms of knowledge and a myriad of counter-hegemonic/transformative practices. It defines the kind of life that can be (legally) recognized and protected.  

And yet, legal structures can also tame private actors and end impunity for egregious violence towards the human and the non-human world, and they can adopt capacious understandings of ecological and social justice attentive to how past wrongs continue in the present.  

This conference will gather scholars, policymakers and activists reflecting on some of the following questions:   

• How can law–local, national, transnational—foster just sustainabilities and underpin a sustainable globalization? 
• How can, and how do various legal actors–from corporations, states to grassroot movements and communities–mobilize law to address the many ecological and social crises globalized societies face? 
• What kind of institutional mechanisms, processes, knowledge production and (legal) technologies can ground transformative practices within planetary limits? 

Keynotes: Professor Radha D’Souza, Ece Temelkuran 

Update 20 June: Unfortunately the event with Ece Temelkuran has been cancelled. We hope to re-organise this event later in the year.

Registration has now closed to attend the conference in person but please do register for the online lecture with Radha D'Souza