Posthumanist legal education : Learning to entangle human law with its more-than-human world

The discourse and function of legal education is inherently anthropocentric. By reproducing legal doctrine through education, law schools inculcate generations of lawyers and decision makers in the biopolitics of law which constructs and privileges the human world, as holders and executors of rights over the rights-less more-than-human world. The narrow scope of law fails to acknowledge and give expression to ‘more-than-human sociality’ (Tsing 2013). Posthuman perspectives are marginalised or absent from the core curriculum, and often the elective periphery, of legal education. Confronted with a climate emergency (partly of its own making), the biopolitics of legal education have been brought into stark relief – revealing the artifice of its neutrality. Lawyers need to learn about their worlds (from which they are never apart, and which they cannot master) and to relate and regulate differently in order to adapt laws to its material conditions. This chapter advances a rationale for a posthuman legal education which works against dominant biopolitics enabling students to unlearn its anthroparchic paradigm by foregrounding the ‘vital entanglement’ (Haraway 2008, p. 163) of the human and more-than-human worlds. Through analysing the limits of existing, even critical, approaches to legal education, the chapter considers the pedagogical possibilities that might equip lawyers to nest human laws within the laws of the Earth.

© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Thomas Giddens and Luca Siliquini-Cinelli; individual chapters, the contributors.