Macquarie University Environmental Law Research Centre (ELRC) Annual Lecture 

Keynote speaker
Professor Sara L. Seck

Professor Sara L. Seck is a leading scholar of environmental, marine, and business and human rights law, based at the Schulich School of Law and Director of the Marine & Environmental Law Institute at Dalhousie University, Canada. 

Her internationally recognised work explores intersectional, feminist, ecological, and decolonial approaches to law, with a focus on reimagining the human, the corporation, and the state to advance planetary justice.

Abstract

The bounded autonomous individual of liberal thought unconsciously permeates legal analysis. This atomistic and self-interested person appears in the form of the ‘reasonable man’, the ‘human’ holder of rights, the ‘worker’ as cog in the wheel of capitalism, and the corporate director and investor motivated to maximize profit. 

The image of the self-sufficient and self-interested atomistic individual also permeates understandings of business enterprises and sovereign states, whether through doctrines of separate legal personality underlying the limited liability corporation, or through doctrines that re-enforce the imaginary borders of the territorial state, pretending it is possible to live well behind walls, secure in the exclusion of the ‘other’. 

The reality of triple planetary crisis tells a very different story from that of the bounded autonomous individual, one that is understood by those who embrace an understanding of the individual as ecologically embedded and socially relational. Crucially, an intersectional approach underscores that individuals are also differentially situated, with individual power and experience of harm emerging from colonial, racial and patriarchal histories and continuities. 

Drawing upon diverse sources of intersectional and feminist relational understandings of the individual, the corporation and the state, I will argue that a key barrier to course correction is the unacknowledged pervasiveness of the bounded autonomous individual in legal thought. There is an urgent need to intentionally confront its power and an opportunity to replace it as part of the effort to course correct when seeking legal solutions to interdependent planetary justice challenges, including the justice challenges confronting the marine environment.