Rapid, unpredictable ecological changes and the resulting instability that are characteristic of the Anthropocene call for a re-examination of the role of law in governing interactions between humans and ecosystems and facilitating adaptation to ecological change. The scope and scale of environmental change we are experiencing seem to call for a regulatory approach, namely forms of law that are designed to pursue well-defined material objectives, often through instruction rules designed to guide behavior to line up with those objectives. Such forms of law have a crucial role to play. However, the negligence principle at the heart of civil liability law is also capable of absorbing and circulating information about environmental risk and means of addressing it, and of translating that information from empirical to normative terms. The grounding of negligence in domestic civil liability law could be a serious obstacle to its effectiveness given the global, Earth system-wide nature of environmental degradation. However, the negligence principle increasingly operates through networks that traverse jurisdictional boundaries, as well as the boundaries between social systems. I propose such a network approach to analyze interactions between the negligence principle and corporate due diligence obligations embedded in domestic legislation and international texts such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). One important result would be the imposition of expanded epistemic obligations on firms, which would in turn require their serious engagement with domestic, international, and transnational environmental and sustainability norms.

Digital Constitutionalism makes sense. We can all see the problem it tries to solve. And like many other ‘constitutionalisms’, Digital Constitutionalism is a project fuelled by the institutional hope of striking a power equilibrium between competing actors. In seeking this equilibrium, however, important assumptions are made and serious questions are oversimplified.

Firstly, Digital Constitutionalism ignores the production logics of digital technologies thereby mistaking ‘objects’ with ‘subjects’. Secondly, Digital Constitutionalism’s myopic lenses lead to narrations of ‘constitutional moments’ caused by digital powers and digital revolutions, separate from the histories of private corporations in the global stage. Finally, Digital Constitutionalism falsely implies the absence of law rather than its presence – or indeed irrelevance – as major causes of this ‘constitutional crisis’. On this account, it seeks to respond to the ‘digital revolution’ with a ‘legal revolution’.

Against this background, this Article invites legal scholars to look back to think differently, and to engage critically with the long evolution of legal regulation that has enabled the emergence of the corporate form and the consolidation of economic and political power on the global stage. This historicisation may ultimately lead us to turn inward and reflect on the role of legal experts and professionals in the political economy of technology. It may even inspire us to break free from restraining mental maps and thinking patterns and to unlock novel intellectual and methodological pathways in the field of Law and Technology.

And if it takes a Digital Constitutionalism to come to this, it will have been worth it.

Global animal law has emerged as a new legal subdiscipline and area of study following the widespread proliferation of animal law and animal law studies across the globe. However, there remains confusion as to what exactly global animal law is. Early global animal law studies are also entrenching norms that facilitate coloniality and neglect intersecting oppressions. In response, this article proposes a conception of global animal law based in global law metatheory and second wave animal ethics. This article critically analyses instances of “globabble” within global animal law, where global-speak has masked ethnocentric, western influence, and bias. This article recommends diversifying and decolonizing global animal law, relabelling some such work as western/European perspectives on animals and international law. It also recommends focusing on deep, critical, and radical animal justice in lieu of welfarism or rights-based theory. The article argues this could inspire a more interconnected, post-Westphalian, multilateral global animal lawscape.

Global law and the environment is an increasingly prominent and rapidly evolving area of scholarship. In confronting global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater scarcity, and other symptoms of planetary breakdown, critical scholars from different intellectual traditions are questioning the traditional approach taken within environmental law which has, so far, only managed to save “some trees” but failed to keep “the forest”. These dominant legal interactions often use the law to address “problems” after they arrive. However, the law plays a key role also in constituting these “problems” by incentivizing certain harmful activities, upholding socio-political-economic structures, and through the limited framing of the issues it claims to solve. It is becoming increasingly clear that we live in a “legally constituted world”. Against this background, there is a need for further critical reflection on the role of the law in preventing, addressing, and even driving the entangled socio-ecological-economic crises of modernity. Through interrogating the assumptions that underlie environmental law, critical scholars have exposed, challenged, and put forward alternative visions to its neo-colonial and gendered biases; its exclusion of indigenous perspectives and voices; its construction upon problematic representations of “the environment” that centres an anthropocentric worldview; and a neoliberal economic order that fosters vast environmental damage.

Few issue areas exemplify the centrifugal forces that have prompted the emergence of global law scholarship better than the environment. With its propensity to blur or transcend conventional distinctions between national and international, public and private, and formal and informal, environmental governance offers a consummate case study to test the promise and perils of global law. In this article we situate global environmental law in the broader debate about lawmaking and application beyond the nation state, tracing the evolution and elusive boundaries of this nascent field. Our survey allows us to identify conceptual ambiguities and missed opportunities in the literature on global environmental law, including challenges to its normativity and legitimacy. From there, however, we proceed to outline a twofold opportunity for the global environmental law project: (i) an opportunity to enrich environmental law with more diverse and inclusive practices; and (ii) an opportunity for collaborative self-reflexivity by the scholars and practitioners of environmental law as these not only interpret and apply but, through their work, actively shape the content of the law.

This article begins by questioning the capacity of the concept of sustainable development to stabilize social reproduction and foster global justice. Based on interdisciplinary perspectives on global governance, it discusses the way in which global law fails to cope with the resonance of advanced capitalism in the world society and ecological systems. Our analysis focuses on the regulatory and institutional features of three interwoven functional regulatory regimes (global finance, energy, and environmental protection), which demonstrate structural governance dysfunction at the expense of ecological integrity and justice in the global realm. The article further examines the capacity of global law to foster a ‘compositive’ and ‘compensatory’ contribution to global justice and the stability of the Earth system through global constitutionalism. In this context, it concludes that Neil Walker's global law approach provides a fertile analytical framework for describing the patterns of interaction between different species of global law but proves to be particularly ‘slippery’ in its normative propositions regarding the gap between global law and justice. Drawing from the Earth system approach, we argue in favour of a global material constitutionalism, recognizant of ecosystemic boundaries and socio-environmental impacts of the global socio-economic metabolism. We consider that the gap between global law and global justice is best addressed by devising more deliberative patterns of transnational governance, as well as ecosystem and human rights approaches, in order to accommodate the fair and equitable internalization of material limits across global regulatory regimes that act as functionally differentiated economic constitutions of advanced capitalism.