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AEL Summer Course: Imagining Planetary Legal Orders (LAW-SS-AELIP-25)

LAW-SS-AELIP-25

Description

Description
The international legal order emerged as an order between peoples. It then became a legal order that governed relations between states and expanded to include humans as legal subjects, recognizing the protection of human rights and investor rights. As a legal order centered on humans and states, can international law tackle the climate and ecological crises without challenging its anthropocentric foundations? Is the expansion of legal subjectivity towards the non-human world conceptually possible? Is such recognition legally, politically and normatively desirable?
This summer course takes the contemporary ecological predicament seriously and asks: can international law be enlisted to imagine planetary orders, that is, orders not just between humans, but also between humans and non-human entities?
We will explore this question with two goals in mind: examining the international law tradition as an anthropocentric ordering project and examining legal scholarship that has imagined planetary futures beyond anthropocentrism.

The International legal Order & the ecological crises
The first task of the summer course is to take stoke of the relationship between international law and the climate and ecological crises. On the one hand, we will examine the basic rules, principles and regimes of international law that protect the environment, such as the the Rio Framework Conventions, and the international law that enables the climate and ecoglogical crises, such as the Louts principle and the principle of Permanent Soveringty over Natural Resources.
On the other hand, international law, for better or worse, was forged in the colonial encounter and in the encounter between peoples, nations, states and individuals from different cultures, ideologies, religions. We will examine international law as it has shaped these –violent and peaceful– encounters, justifying domination and opening avenues for resistance. What can we learn from these histories of international law, when imagining a law open to the encounter between humans and non-humans?

Imagining Planetary Legal Orders
The second task is to study four approaches that challenge the traditional anthropocentric framework: rights of nature; post-human legalities; international law & geography and legal scholarship on the planetary.

We will study these approaches from a theoretical and practice-oriented perspective asking how these approaches define the problem and find solutions to tackle the environmental crisis, climate crisis or the Anthropocene.
The main ideas and scholarly contributions by exponents of these approaches will be studied. Then, we will collaborate with one or more NGOs pursuing activism that challenges the anthropocentric framework. How would each of these approaches formulate a different legal response to the question how to govern relations between human and non-humans?

Convenors:

• Arnulf Becker Lorca, Professor of Public International Law, EUI
• Tim Lindgren, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, EUI

Academic faculty:

• Alexandra Huneeus, Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law, Law School. University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Marie Petersmann, Assistant Professor of Law, LSE Law School
• Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Professor and Chair of International Law at Tilburg University
• Gail Lythgoe, Lecturer in Global Law, University of Edinburgh. TBC
• Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, Senior Lecturer in Law and Fellow of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS), Queen Mary University of London TBC

In collaboration with:

• NGO xxx

Sessions: 15-26 June 2026

Class schedule
TBC

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