This book is a collection of speculative judgments that, along with accompanying commentaries, pursue a novel enquiry into how judges might respond to the formidable and planetary scaled challenges of the Anthropocene. The book’s contributors – from Australia, Asia, Europe and the United Kingdom – take up a range of issues: including multispecies justice, the challenges of intergenerational justice, dimensions of post-colonial justice, the potential contribution of AI platforms to the judgment process, and the future of judging and law in and beyond the Anthropocene. The project takes its inspiration from existing critical judgments projects. It is, however, thoroughly interdisciplinary. In anticipating future scenarios, and designing or adapting legal principles to respond to them, the book’s contributors have been assisted by climate scientists with expertise in future modelling; they have benefitted from the experience of fiction writers in future world building; and they have incorporated elements of the future worlds depicted in various texts of speculative fiction and artworks. The judgments are, moreover – and of necessity – speculative and hypothetical in their subject matter. Thus, taken together, they constitute a collaborative experiment in creating the inclusive and radical imaginaries of the future common law. The Anthropocene Judgments Project will appeal to critical and sociolegal academics, scholars in the environmental humanities, environmental lawyers, students and others with interests in the pressing issues of ecology, multispecies justice, climate change, the intersection of AI platforms and the law, and the future of law in the Anthropocene.

This book addresses the ways in which the Black Summer megafires influenced the development of climate narratives throughout 2020. It analyses the global pandemic, and its ensuing restrictions, as a countervailing force in the production of such narratives. Lives and properties were lost in the spring and summer of 2019 and 2020, when catastrophic bushfires burnt through millions of hectares of mainland Australia. Nearly 3 billion native animals died. And for millions of Australians, and others worldwide, it was through the Australian megafires that the global climate emergency became tangible and concrete, no longer a comfortably deferred, albeit problematic abstraction which could be consigned to future generations to deal with. This book explores the legal and other implications of new understandings of climate emergency arising from the fires, and the emergence of a hierarchy of emergencies as the pandemic came to dominate global and domestic political discourses. It examines narratives of culpability, and legal avenues for seeking retribution from government and big fossil fuel emitters. It also considers the impact of the fires on the burgeoning phenomenon of climate activism, particularly in Australia, and the ways in which pandemic restrictions curtailed such activism. Finally, the book reflects on the fires through the lenses offered by climate fiction, and apocalyptic fiction more generally, in order to consider how these shape, and might shape, our responses to them. This important and timely book will appeal to environmental lawyers and socio-legal theorists; as well as other scholars and activists with interests in climate change and its impact. It is recommended for anyone concerned about current and future climate disasters, and the shortcomings in legal, political and popular responses to the climate crisis.

The book examines the narratives of climate change which have developed and which are currently evolving in three areas: law, fiction and activism. Narratives of climate change generated by litigants, judges, writers of fiction and activists are having, and will have, a profound effect on the way we respond to the climate change crisis. Acknowledging the prevalence of unreliable narrators, this book explores the reliability and significance of different forms of climate narrative. The author analyses overlapping themes and points of intersection, considering the recurrent motif of the trickster, the prominence of the child, the significance and ongoing viability of the rights discourse, and the increasingly prevalent emergency framing with its multiple implications for law's empire. She asks how law, fiction and activism measure up as textual and performative fora for telling the story of climate change and anticipating a climate-changed future. And, in addition, how can they help foster transformative narratives which empower us to confront the climate change crisis? This highly topical, cross-disciplinary work will be of interest to anyone concerned about the growing climate emergency and makes a valuable contribution to climate law, environmental law, the environmental humanities and ecocriticism.

The book examines the narratives of climate change which have developed and which are currently evolving in three areas: law, fiction and activism. Narratives of climate change generated by litigants, judges, writers of fiction and activists are having, and will have, a profound effect on the way we respond to the climate change crisis. Acknowledging the prevalence of unreliable narrators, this book explores the reliability and significance of different forms of climate narrative. The author analyses overlapping themes and points of intersection, considering the recurrent motif of the trickster, the prominence of the child, the significance and ongoing viability of the rights discourse, and the increasingly prevalent emergency framing with its multiple implications for law's empire. She asks how law, fiction and activism measure up as textual and performative fora for telling the story of climate change and anticipating a climate-changed future. And, in addition, how can they help foster transformative narratives which empower us to confront the climate change crisis? This highly topical, cross-disciplinary work will be of interest to anyone concerned about the growing climate emergency and makes a valuable contribution to climate law, environmental law, the environmental humanities and ecocriticism.

This book is a collection of judgments drawn from the innovative Wild Law Judgment Project. In participating in the Wild Law Judgment Project, which was inspired by various feminist judgment projects, contributors have creatively reinterpreted judicial decisions from an Earth-centred point of view by rewriting existing judgments, or creating fictional judgments, as wild law. Authors have confronted the specific challenges of aligning existing Western legal systems with Thomas Berry's philosophy of Earth jurisprudence through judgment writing and rewriting. This book thus opens up judicial decision-making and the common law to critical scrutiny from a wild law or Earth-centred perspective. Based upon ecocentric rather than human-centred or anthropocentric principles, Earth jurisprudence poses a unique critical challenge to the dominant anthropocentric or human-centred focus and orientation of the common law. The authors interrogate the anthropocentric and property rights assumptions embedded in existing common law by placing Earth and the greater community of life at the centre of their rewritten and hypothetical judgments. Covering areas as diverse as tort law, intellectual property law, criminal law, environmental law, administrative law, international law, native title law and constitutional law, this unique collection provides a valuable tool for practitioners and students who are interested in learning more about the emerging ecological jurisprudence movement. It helps us to see more clearly what a new system of law might look like: one in which Earth really matters.

This book is a collection of judgments drawn from the innovative Wild Law Judgment Project. In participating in the Wild Law Judgment Project, which was inspired by various feminist judgment projects, contributors have creatively reinterpreted judicial decisions from an Earth-centred point of view by rewriting existing judgments, or creating fictional judgments, as wild law. Authors have confronted the specific challenges of aligning existing Western legal systems with Thomas Berry's philosophy of Earth jurisprudence through judgment writing and rewriting. This book thus opens up judicial decision-making and the common law to critical scrutiny from a wild law or Earth-centred perspective. Based upon ecocentric rather than human-centred or anthropocentric principles, Earth jurisprudence poses a unique critical challenge to the dominant anthropocentric or human-centred focus and orientation of the common law. The authors interrogate the anthropocentric and property rights assumptions embedded in existing common law by placing Earth and the greater community of life at the centre of their rewritten and hypothetical judgments. Covering areas as diverse as tort law, intellectual property law, criminal law, environmental law, administrative law, international law, native title law and constitutional law, this unique collection provides a valuable tool for practitioners and students who are interested in learning more about the emerging ecological jurisprudence movement. It helps us to see more clearly what a new system of law might look like: one in which Earth really matters.