How to do things with Latour: A proposal for waste law

• Department of Law

The EUI Environmental Law and Governance Working Group hosts a roundtable discussion with Garance Thomas (PhD Researcher, Sciences Po Law School and Visiting Researcher, EUI).

Last year, Bruno Latour left us with a tremendous heritage of thought-provoking scholarship. While working in a laboratory in the early 70s, Latour employed ethnology and anthropology of science to reveal the limitations of the lawyer's world. According to Latour, reality encompasses a broader network of humans and non-humans, which the law, built upon modern premises, fails to reflect. Environmental risks such as climate change are falling through the loopholes created during translation processes from scientific knowledge into legal forms. In their own narrow and individual epistemological categories, legal constructions and fictions destroy the materiality of the world. 

If one prioritised the habitability of the earth, what would the legal structure/construction look like? How should we reconceive our relation to the earth through new epistemologies? How can lawyers solve conflicts otherwise and finally "touch down"?

After a quick introduction of Latour's work by Garance, we will freely discuss the first two chapters of Latour's 'We have never been modern' (1993). At the end of the session, Garance will apply Latour's theory to waste law, arguing the material limits of property law to encompass waste products and highlighting the need for a reform of the foundations of civil law on this basis.