Rethinking legal time: The temporal turn in socio-legal studies

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl.1811

Keywords:

legal personhood, rights of nature, legal time, climate change, private law, Personalidad jurídica, derechos de la naturaleza, tiempo jurídico, cambio climático, derecho privado

Abstract

This article introduces a temporal approach to law as potentially innovative for socio-legal studies. It argues that bringing a focus on time into legal thought and practice is an important move for decentering the individual subject as conventionally conceived and for developing legal tools capable of recognising networks, ties and assemblages, and challenging the anthropocentric character of modern law. It frames climate change and the ecological crisis as a context for rethinking a number of fundamental legal forms, such as property and contract, as ways in which modern law can deal simultaneously with different temporalities – the present, an intergenerational time and a planetary time. 

Este artículo explora la relación entre derecho y tiempo en el contexto del cambio ecológico y climático. Sostiene que centrar la atención en el tiempo en el análisis y la práctica jurídicas es un paso importante para descentrar al sujeto individual tal y como se concibe convencionalmente y para desarrollar instrumentos jurídicos capaces de reconocer las redes, los ensamblajes y los colectivos, así como de cuestionar el carácter antropocéntrico del derecho moderno. Considera el cambio ecológico y climático como un contexto para repensar una serie de formas jurídicas fundamentales como formas mediante las cuales el derecho moderno puede tratar simultáneamente con diferentes temporalidades: el presente, un tiempo intergeneracional y un tiempo planetario.

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Author Biography

Veronica Pecile, University of Lucerne

Veronica Pecile, Lucernaiuris-Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne. Affiliated Researcher. Frohburgstrasse 3, Luzern 6002, Switzerland. Email address: pecile@collegium.ethz.ch

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Published

13-11-2023 — Updated on 20-12-2023

How to Cite

Pecile, V. (2023) “Rethinking legal time: The temporal turn in socio-legal studies”, Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 13(S1), pp. S386-S401. doi: 10.35295/osls.iisl.1811.