Litigating for the Future
Mitchell Travis: Futures of Law and Justice; Challenging the Epistemology of the Ever-Present
A rowing body of work in cultural studies has lamented the slow cancellation of the future. This loss of futurity has resulted in the production of an epistemological ever-present characterised by both its freneticism and lack of social change. This talk analyses this phenomenon through a discussion of neoliberalism and its focus on short-term economic goals alongside relentless attacks on the humanities. In order to challenge this, Futures of Law and Justice advocates for science fiction as a legal method, examining the important work that science fiction can do in terms of stimulating new and innovative approaches to justice, providing alternative conceptions of political and legal structures and extrapolating the dangers of current social trends.
Ammar Bustami: The Legal Relationship Between Present and Future Generations – How to Address Intergenerational Equity?
It is the year 2100 on planet Earth. Life has dramatically changed, not only due to the effects of climate change. The international community decides to send a time-traveller back to the year 2025, tasked with confronting this earlier generation with one question: Why did you violate your duties of intergenerational equity? But is this question the correct one to ask? Or is the question instead whether intergenerational equity is legally binding at all? Do future generations have rights? Which institutional means do they have to be represented? This contribution attempts to answer these questions but goes beyond traditional legal analysis. Instead, its intertemporal method allows us to address our relationship with the future by taking our own and their future perspective on the law.
is Associate Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds. He is the co-editor of Law, Technology and Human’s special issue Jurisprudence of the Future (2022), and two Routledge edited collections Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction (2024) and Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary (2024). He is also the co-author of Intersex Embodiment: Legal Frameworks Beyond Identity and Disorder with Bristol University Press.
is a lawyer based in Hamburg who specialises in animal rights law and environmental protection law. He researched international environmental law at the University of Hamburg and completed his PhD thesis on the legal relationship between present and future generations. In his teaching and publications, he works on questions of constitutional and public international law, inter alia on the right of assembly and strategic (climate) litigation. In his leisure time, he is the author of three fantasy novels.
In English