The Law's Ultimate Frontier: Towards an Ecological Jurisprudence

Horatia Muir Watt is Professor at Sciences Po Law School, Paris, France.

Preface v

Introduction: Inklings 1
I. Nature as Alterity in Legal Form 5
II. Nature, Legality and Natural Law 8
III. Law, Bios and Bare Life 13
IV. Globalisation: A Very Short Story 14
V. The ‘Old Settlement’ and the Legal Summa Divisio 15
VI. Caveats: Law and Nomos; Lex and Ius 20
VII. Private International Law and its Double Scenography 23
VIII. Law’s Residues and the Shadow Story 28
IX. Bricolage, Interdisciplinarity and Method 29
X. What is Ecological about this Alternative Jurisprudential Design? 31
XI. Plan and Project 31

Part I
Epistemology and Genealogy: Struggling for the Soul of Method
I. An Initial Glimpse: Private International Law and its Inner Conflicts 45
II. An Example: Cross-Border Environmental Litigation 46
III. Down to Earth: Punctum 50
IV. Bird’s-Eye View: Studium 56
V. The Stakes in Method 61
A. Monism vs Pluralism and Theories of Truth 61
B. The Ecological Nature of Method 63
C. Approaching Alterity in Legal Form 65
Nature at the Stake 68
1. The Story of Origin 69
I. Genealogy and Methodology 71
A. The Consensual Tale 72
B. Frictions and Contradictions 77
II. Myth and Legacy 84
A. The Domestic Front: Irrelevance 85
B. The International Front: Self-Isolation 90
The Return of the Repressed 94
2. The Shadow Account 96
I. Dialectical Tensions 99
A. Paradigm Dichotomies 101
B. Nesting 104
II. Competing Imaginaries 107
A. State/Non-State 110
B. Law and Fact 118
C. Foreign/Domestic 124
Eclosion 129

Part II
Aesthetics and Ontology: Constructing the Nomos of the In-Between
3. Jurisdictional Jurisprudence 141
I. Topos and Telos 145
A. Territoriality as Natural Description 147
B. Territoriality as Value Judgement 152
II. Sovereignty 156
A. The Law of Laws 158
B. The Status of the Exception 166
Transition(s) 171
4. A Jurisprudence of the Border 172
I. A ‘Juridical Ecology of Ligatures’ 178
A. Law as Go-between 181
B. Law’s Oscillation 189
II. Law’s Morphological Plurality 193
A. The Gaze of the Jaguar 199
B. The Art of the Shaman 208
Before the Law: After Extinction? 215

Part III
Economy and Ethics: Repairing the Split in the Oikos
5. Private International Neoliberal Legality 227
I. Toeing the Line 227
A. Debt and the Capture of Human Collateral 230
B. Foreign Investment and the ‘Capture of the Space of the International’ 236
C. Capital Structure and the Capture of Accountability 240
D. Development and the Capture of Time 247
II. Disembedding the Rule of Law 251
A. The Darwinian U-turn: A Brief but Giddy Detour 253
B. Autonomy as a Licence to Disembed 258
Reversal 267
6. An Ethic of Responsiveness: The Demands of Interalterity 269
I. The Appeal of the (Legal) Other 274
A. The Categories of Tolerance 277
B. The Social Construction of Acceptability (Ordre Public) 282
C. Wrongs of Rights 285
II. The Law of the Other 292
A. Responsibility and the Experience of Incommensurability 296
B. Hospitality and the De-centring of Self 301
Coalescence 309
7. Residue: Law’s Last Judgment: The Threshold of Our Responsibility 311

Bibliography 316
Index 339