Our world, and human life, has interconnection at its core: individual people live in a dense network of relationships. These relationships have a huge effect on how we live our lives, our happiness and freedom, and how we think and feel about ourselves.
In some ways, this is recognised in our culture and understanding of the world, but it is not the way that our law, economics, politics and mainstream culture see the world. Instead, the main approach is about the individual and the individual alone. Individual people are thought of in abstraction, on a conceptual island in which the web of relationships and our social and material conditions are absent.
The Interconnected Law Project is about challenging this paradigm, seeking to change how we understand law and, ultimately, how our legal systems function.
The Web of Relationships
Every person lives in a network of relationships. We have our intimate relationships — family, partners, close friends — as well as our broader social relationships, neighbourhoods, communities, and society or societies.
We also have economic relations, such as with employers, businesses we buy from and corporations which have huge influence on our society, our financial relations in society, and all of our political relationships.
Vitally, there are also the ecological relationships with our environment, from the air that we breath through to the ability of soil to grow food, ecosystems which provide oxygen and sustain animal life, which we need to be healthy for us to eat, and the temperature of our planet.
Instead, Interconnection
We are all interconnected with each other and the rest of the natural world. Especially with the current virus situation, we recognise that our health is interconnected: the health of those we come into contact with affects our health. The same is true for things like security, freedom, justice and wellbeing: these are all relational values. To realise individual freedom, for example, a person must live in a network of relationships which foster and empower them, whereas relationships which constrain, exploit or oppress take away from freedom.
Our political, economic and legal systems are based on an old paradigm which sees the world as a machine made of individual parts, instead of holistically as a system working together. Society is understood as an amalgamation of atomised individuals, gathered together like air particles in a box.
We conceptualise freedom as individual liberty or autonomy, whereas we should understand it with regard to the network of relationships we live in. Economics is about individual profit and the totality of economic activity, not whether human activity is healthy for us, whether it creates and sustains relationships that improve our lives, or whether it is exploitative or just.
The Interconnected Law project looks at law’s role in this. Currently, law looks at individuals, focusing on individual rights and securing individual freedom. The human condition of interconnection, and the web of relations we all live in, is not really in the scope of law. But it should be.
Law for Social Transformation
Law plays a significant role in structuring and influencing various relationships and relations in society, even if it doesn’t see them. Once we recognise this, it follows that law should be working to improve the web of relationships we live in. Law’s goal should be to foster positive relations. It should seek to transform relationships which are exploitative, harmful, unjust or destructive into ones which are just, harmonious and balanced.
Law should not do this alone — but nor could it. Law is not an isolated discipline, but is interwoven with politics, economics, culture and social norms. These must all change together, jointly weaving a better world in an iterative way. Law has been overlooked as part of economic and social transformation, but it has a key role to play once we recognise that law itself needs to be transformed.
I’ll give a couple of examples: our relationship with Nature and criminal law.
The rest of Nature is currently treated as a collection of objects which are not owned, waiting for humans to appropriate them, dominate and control them. The relationships we have with Nature, including the ways in which it provides us with things we need for our very survival, are mostly ignored. This should be transformed so that we live in harmony with Nature in a sustainable way. For law, this means that Nature should have rights so that it can participate in our legal systems as an equal and defend itself legally. Our law should look at the relationships between humans and ecosystems, animals and the planet, and work to make these harmonious.
Our criminal justice system is about punishing individuals and trying to ‘fix’ individual people. Instead, it should recognise the conditions and relational context in which people commit crimes, and it should also recognise the harms that crimes cause, which cannot be repaired or healed by punishing a perpetrator. Criminal justice should work to transform social relations to address the causes of crime.
These are examples of the many ways that the Interconnected approach to law would change our legal systems and our society. Developing our understanding of Law and how our legal systems work is what the Interconnected Law project seeks to do.