LAW BACK ON TRACK
Reshaping law & justice to address todays’ societal challenges
Why?
Our society and other communities are facing immediate challenges, which are likely to jeopardise - in the short term - sustainable living and wellbeing on our planet for current, and future, generations: climate change, ecological imbalances, environmental disruptions, increasingly uneven distribution of income and wealth, disappointment and disillusionment with democracy…
Scientists, historians, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and even – heterodox – economists …, claim – and some have been for decades -, that we need to review, change and reshape our way of living and our activities.
Apparently with little or no success, however, as challenges are becoming more and more threatening.
Action is needed, now.
Why “law back on track” (LBT)?
It is no secret that the disruptions faced are due to human, economic and financial, activities, governed by legal rules and instruments such as amongst others contracts, ownership, liability, intellectual property, and rules governing markets and businesses…
Therefore, when economic and financial activities cause distortions that endanger sustainability and wellbeing on our planet, the legal system cannot wash its hands in innocence.
In democratic societies, law and justice are not what they ought to be when their application results in global warming, loss of biodiversity, health crises, inequal access to education and information, and different life expectancy depending on income and wealth.
The law is clearly off track.
What is striking, is that most of legal experts and orthodox economists, captured by economic (neo)liberalism, do not feel concerned.
They believe that continuing with the current legal and economic system can, in time, overcome all challenges. Yet they fail to explain how unaltered legal rules and instruments would become the game changers we need.
Anchored in economic (neo)liberalism, the legal system of the 21st century will, however, - if unchanged - continue to yield the same results and outcomes it has delivered over the past two centuries.
Law and justice must be put back on track of their regulatory function in a democratic society. Then they will be able to, effectively and efficiently, address all societal disruptions faced today.
How?
LBT is dedicated to research and publications that focus on the relationship between law and justice, on the one hand, and effective democracy, on the other hand, to allow our society and other communities to deal with the current challenges.
Through questioning traditional legal tools, rules and thinking, LBT wants to put law (and justice) back on track. LBT aims to share in open access innovative and constructive analysis and proposals, which aim to ensure that all people can flourish within planetary and democratic boundaries, and that they can benefit from the best possible living conditions.
To foster legal research on how law and justice allow our society and other communities to deal with the current societal challenges, Prof. Dr. Régine Feltkamp and Prof. Dr. Em. Ludo Cornelis have set up the LBT platform.
The LBT platform welcomes and publishes legal research, publications and events (in Dutch, English or French) related to the ways in which law and justice currently contribute to climate change, ecological distress, inequality and democratic distortions, as well as related to how law and justice can - and must - be reshaped to overcome these urgent challenges, within planetary and democratic limits.
Do you want to contribute to LBT by submitting for publication on the LBT platform a contribution or an event which aims at putting law and justice back on track again?
Please contact us.
