KDEC 9280 - Earth Jurisprudence

A key question in climate justice is determining who will need to pay for the necessary changes in world economy. Law is seen here as in most of climate politics as merely a tool for effecting political decisions. But aren’t legal systems themselves agents that have shaped how humans interact with the rest of nature? And aren’t international inequalities fundamentally shaped by law? This class inquires specifically into the place of law in shaping global political ecology. How have different national legal systems, the ability to combine them as well as their framing in international law structured current global financial and ecological inequalities?

We will read and discuss historical and contemporary works studying the place of legal pluralism in the geographies of global production networks and global financial/wealth chains. How have interactions between national legal systems shaped cartographies or production, consumption, wealth accumulation and physical remodeling of the planet?

To render this rather abstract framing apprehensible and operational, we will look into the material world of global production networks. The main task in this class is to form a group and write a product report unpacking the production network of some simple everyday product detailing the legal, environmental and financial cartography of its production.

The evaluation for the class consists of two main components:

+ regular reading responses (1/3)

and

+ a group assignment – Value Chain Earth Report (2/3) – in teams of four or five students unpack the legal, environmental and financial cartography of the production of an ordinary consumer item. We will workshop those reports mid-way through the semester.

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