GATES Evening talk - Regulating human relationship with nature: role of empirical reality & participatory lawmaking

There is a disjuncture between the traditional narrative of the human-nature relationship in the common law and how that relationship is understood on the basis of empirical evidence offered by natural sciences. The common law (English, judge-made law) discerns human-nature relationship as a relationship of domination and subservience – human mastery over nature. This knowledge of the relationship in the common law tradition has particular significance for normative ordering of property, labour and economic development. In this talk, I argue that the continued authenticity of the common law in socio-ecological ordering of the human-nature relationship is conditional upon its willingness to subject its epistemological foundation to empirical verification.

Subjecting the foundational values of a legal system to external evaluation is an explicitly reconstructive project, which needs to recognize and take seriously the role of expansive participation in making sense of (i.e., interpreting) the scientific principles of human-nature relationship in the practical realities of social complexities, including social inequalities and principles of social justice. I suggest that it is through participatory lawmaking – legislating – that the common law’s archaic foundations could be revised. However, deliberative participation beyond the formal representative institutions is necessary in order to effectively learn from and draw on diverse traditions that are more attuned to the realities of human-nature relationships.