Edited book
Autonomous legal persons and interconnected ecosystems: an ‘Ecological’ Self towards the age of re-embodiment
Contributions to law, philosophy and ecology, pp.224-238
Law, justice and ecology, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
2016
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Abstract
Notwithstanding Oliver Wendell Holmes famous assertion that ‘the
common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky’,3 Western juris -
prudence still envisions law as an abstract entity located somewhere outside
the individual or any collective of individuals.4 Legal positivism – in
particular the identification of law as a relatively independent closed
logical system5 – still dominates the landscape of legal education as well as
of legal practice, powerfully enshrined within Hart’s five main tenets of
positivism6 and Kelsen’s ‘pure theory of law’.7 But the idea of law as an
abstract reality somehow extrinsic to – if not bereft of – human agency is
not only the province of the positive ‘science’ of jurisprudence as
envisioned by Austin.8 Equally, natural law theories also locate the law
some where ‘out there’, whether in a moral universe preceding human
consciousness or in an inevitably uncertain and yet purportedly objectively
discoverable ‘state of nature’.9 Western legal discourse thus appears
engaged in a self-referential dialogue with its own abstract premises,
removed from the physicality of the world in which that dialogue is
inscribed.10
Details
- Title
- Autonomous legal persons and interconnected ecosystems: an ‘Ecological’ Self towards the age of re-embodiment
- Creators
- Alessandro Pelizzon - Southern Cross UniversityGabrielle O'Shannessy
- Publication Details
- Contributions to law, philosophy and ecology, pp.224-238
- Series
- Law, justice and ecology
- Publisher
- Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group; New York, NY
- Identifiers
- 991012881500302368
- Academic Unit
- School of Law and Justice; National Centre for Flood Research; Faculty of Business, Law and Arts; Law
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Edited book