Peer2Politics

How can we construct a right to a healthy and clean environment that is enforceable in today’s complex international legal order? What legal construct would be visionary and ambitious enough to meet the urgent need for environmental justice and protection and at the same time be enforceable in court rather than fall into the category of ‘soft law’?

This is a 30-minute video where Janelle Orsi, of the Sustainable Economy Law Center, describes, in draft form, 8 proposed legal structural principles for commons-based organizations. Watch the video here:

Creative Commons allows people to grant others freedom, but with very specific and often mutually exclusive conditions. And that’s only sort of freedom.

The relationship between law and the commons is very much on my mind these days.  I recently posted a four-part serialization of my strategy memo, "Reinventing Law for the Commons."  The following public talk, which I gave at the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin on September 8, is a kind of companion piece.  The theme: this year's celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and its significance for commoners today.

“All this, evidently requires the jurist’s attention to the difficult and urgent task of constructing the new foundation of a legal order capable of transcending the dualisms discussed inherent in the current order. Given the dominance of private property, individualism, and competition as the basis of the current legal order, the new order must correct this imbalance by focusing on the collective and the commons as the center, creating an institutional setting reflecting long term sustainability and full inclusion of all the global commoners especially the poorest and most vulnerable. To do so we need first an epistemic (and political) emancipation from the predatory appetites of both the State and private property, the two fundamental components of the dominant imperialistic Western wisdom.