The Sociable Person and the Law: Recognising and Regulating the Social Dimension of the Human Experience

This cutting-edge collection is a riposte to the deep assumption that law should be written exclusively for and by the reasonable person, as the person to whom law is addressed and by reference to whom laws are designed and calibrated.

The book looks at how the social dimension of the human experience is central to human existence: connections with other people shape our lives in profound ways. While law confers formal status on certain relationships and intervenes to remedy serious injustices that occur, it does not generally concern itself with the individual as a person formed through those and other relationships. It is most often addressed to the individual, on the assumption that individuals are rational autonomous agents.

It poses a deep challenge to that assumption. First, the collection opens space for conversation on the social dimension of the human experience in the context of law by critically considering existing conceptual tools that could support such a conversation, e.g., community, solidarity, associations,collective rights, and cosmopolitan law. Second, the collection takes an inventory of the extent to which law currently takes the social dimension of personhood into account in fields as diverse as criminal culpability, natural resources law, human rights, company lawand administrative justice.

In moving beyond the fields that have already been the subject of post-individualist and post-autonomy discourse, such as family law and medical law, this collection is a vital contribution to igniting a broader conversation about the relationship between the sociable person and the law.