Origins and Development
Towards the end of my undergraduate degree (Oxford University, 2011-15) I was asking big questions: What is law’s role in society? What would a just legal system look like? What would it mean to expand Earth Jurisprudence beyond just thinking about ‘the environment’ and to inter-human issues? What does it mean for “rights” when the legal franchise is expanded to include Rights of Nature, and it is all about relationships between rights-holders? In 2017, when starting to think about what I would write my master’s dissertation on, I realised that I had much bigger things in my sight than just a dissertation.
(For more about me, check out the About Me page.)
I had been inspired by Earth Jurisprudence, which sort-of became the foundation for my legal thinking after I read Cormac Cullinan’s Wild Law in 2015, and my LLM dissertation was about Earth Jurisprudence and Human Rights.
After this, I came to the conclusion that Earth Jurisprudence was incomplete. It was only about the human-rest of Nature relationship, and not about inter-human relationships. Researching the dissertation, I came across Jennifer Nedelsky’s relational approach to law, and shortly afterwards a friend pointed me to a book about a Systems View, naming a broader paradigm covering many disciplines of ‘holistic’ or ‘systemic’ thinking, which the relational approach and Earth Jurisprudence are both within.
My conclusion was that all of these ideas needed to be drawn together into one approach to law, which covers the entirety of human activity. All three of these critiques could be covered by the term ‘Interconnection’: humans as interconnected with the rest of nature; individuals as interconnected with each other; society as about interconnection. I thought of this as ‘an approach to law based on interconnection’, or ‘Interconnected Law’ for short. Crucially, this name captures the positive vision as well as the negative critique.
A couple of years later, I came across social ecology, which sets out how the social and ecological are inseparable, that it is totally mistaken to think of society as separate from nature, or to conceptualise or try to address ecological issues as distinct from social issues. I had been thinking along these lines, and reading Murray Bookchin’s work clarified this for me. Social ecology has since been integrated into Interconnected Law.
Of course, ‘academic’ and political ideas do not exist in a vacuum, and I have also been influenced by many other experiences and ideas. These included activist organising, often done with non-hierarchical principles; working with young people; and working for an MP. The aim is not to write about ideas abstractly, but produce something useful for a range of political actors and to change in the world, not just interpret it.
Work in 2017-2022
Since completing the LLM, Interconnected Law was a slow side-project for me. Jobs and life (and ill health) took up the majority of time, and I was slowly developing my ideas around law and reading a couple of things.
In 2020 I made this website and wrote an initial set of blog posts for it, as well as writing some articles for online media platforms. The longest of these was a long read for openDemocracy. In 2021, I was invited by the Future Law Institute to deliver a workshop for them. The audio recording (1.5h) and presentation (10k words) are available here. If you want a shorter dip into what I’m doing here, then pick something from the articles section!
Currently
As of October 2022, I am a PhD student at Birkbeck University in London, UK, to work on Interconnected Law.
Get in Touch
If you would like to discuss anything, suggest some way I could share these ideas further, or potentially even help fund the project, please do get in touch.