The co-constitution of human and inhuman legalities

Grounding law in emergent materialities might be understood as the task of the critical jurisprudent in a planetary age. Law in the Western tradition is conventionally concerned with how matter comes to assume legal meaning and authority. While law is materialised through inscription and speech, its foundational elements are understood to be grounded in abstraction, attributing meaning to space, time and matter as questions of fact. An orientation toward the inhuman, which is not extrinsic to the human but subtends it, reveals the contingency of law’s ontological commitments and illuminates the processes of inclusion and exclusion by which presumptive boundaries and binaries emerge. Thinking beyond the singularity of the rights-bearing legal subject in this ‘age of rights’, upon which legal abstraction turns, I find myself enfolded in fleshy relationships of obligation and dependence. In this seminar, I explore the co-constitution of human and inhuman legalities. Taking up and extending the analytic of the inhumanities, I offer a relational idea of ecologies of obligation, or lawful ecologies, that inhere within sites of restoration and ‘re-stor(y)ing’. An apprehension of plurality, as lawful (law-full) ecologies, foregrounds an ethics of obligation in an expanded nomos.

Dr Kathleen Birrell is a Senior Lecturer in Law at La Trobe Law School. Her research adopts critical legal methodologies to explore the changing relationship between law and ecology, law and humanities and decolonial theory and praxis. She is the author of Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law (Routledge, 2016). Her current projects explore the implications of new materialism for legal scholarship, practice and activism in the context of the Anthropocene.