The Anthropocene Judgments Project: Futureproofing the Common Law

This book is a collection of speculative judgments that, along with accompanying commentaries, pursue a novel enquiry into how judges might respond to the formidable and planetary scaled challenges of the Anthropocene.

The book’s contributors – from Australia, Asia, Europe and the United Kingdom – take up a range of issues: including multispecies justice, the challenges of intergenerational justice, dimensions of post-colonial justice, the potential contribution of AI platforms to the judgment process, and the future of judging and law in and beyond the Anthropocene. The project takes its inspiration from existing critical judgments projects. It is, however, thoroughly interdisciplinary. In anticipating future scenarios, and designing or adapting legal principles to respond to them, the book’s contributors have been assisted by climate scientists with expertise in future modelling; they have benefitted from the experience of fiction writers in future world building; and they have incorporated elements of the future worlds depicted in various texts of speculative fiction and artworks. The judgments are, moreover – and of necessity – speculative and hypothetical in their subject matter. Thus, taken together, they constitute a collaborative experiment in creating the inclusive and radical imaginaries of the future common law.

The Anthropocene Judgments Project will appeal to critical and sociolegal academics, scholars in the environmental humanities, environmental lawyers, students and others with interests in the pressing issues of ecology, multispecies justice, climate change, the intersection of AI platforms and the law, and the future of law in the Anthropocene.