Citizens as lawmakers: legal innovation and the competing moralities of environmental juridification

Abstract

Law has increasingly become a relevant political language and a field of political contestation for citizens. In the context of socioenvironmental disputes, citizens have appealed to the courts or become involved in lawmaking as means of asserting their rights and worldviews. Such citizen engagements with law, I argue, amount to a form of worldmaking, as they allow for the introduction of situated moral values that challenge existing notions, rooted in liberal legality, about the environment, development, and sovereignty. This article explores this argument through the prism of the twelve-year long citizen opposition to mining in El Salvador and citizen engagement with law that culminated in the country’s 2017 national ban on metal mining. It focuses on two processes of citizen-led legal experimentation: participation in a commercial arbitration dispute through two amicus curiae submissions and the production of several iterations of law drafts. The ethnographic research on which the article is based employed a networked methodology with a constellation of citizen actors whose engagements with law brought about the mining ban and articulated a set of alternative moral values.