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

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between law and time in the context of ecological and climate change. 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 ecological and climate change as a background for rethinking a number of fundamental legal forms as ways in which modern law can deal simultaneously with different temporalities – the present, an intergenerational time and a planetary time.