Fundamentals - OOO
Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), by decentering the human and positing a flat network of objects whose existence and relations radically exceed our perception and instrumentalization, offers a crucial philosophical framework for diagnosing the pathology of modern law and outlining its cure. The anthropocentric legal system operates under a "translational violence," where it reduces the full autonomy and complexity of nonhuman objects (a river, an ecosystem, a weather pattern) to mere resources, properties, or externalities within a uniquely human legal drama. This reduction is a symptom of the fiction of continuity. By confronting collapse as a present reality, OOO forces us to recognize that these nonhuman objects, with their own ontological agendas, are retreating from our inadequate legal framework and imposing their agency in disruptive ways (droughts, pandemics, ecological collapses). The task of speculative law, therefore, is not simply to better regulate these "resources," but to design relational legal ontologies that, in the style of OOO, recognize the withdrawal of objects and create structures that allow for a less violent and more humble coexistence. This entails prototyping legal systems that do not attempt to dominate or translate the non-human, but rather facilitate political and ethical encounters with the entities that are already, irrevocably, co-determining our collapsing collective present and future.
Our
Pillars
Critical Legal Archaeology in Times of Collapse
This pillar is dedicated to the systematic deconstruction of legal regimes whose pathological persistence accelerates the process of collapse. We do not start from the premise that law is "absent" in ecological crises, but rather that it is excessively present in a dysfunctional way.
Design of Relational Legal Ontologies
Against the substantialist and atomistic ontology of liberal law—which treats rivers, forests, and the atmosphere as "resources" or "property"—this pillar proposes the speculative design of frameworks based on relational and processual ontologies. We research and prototype legal regimes that recognize the agency and subjectivity of the non-human, not as a concession, but as a survival imperative in the Anthropocene.
Protocols for Collapse Management
Recognizing that collapse is not a future event but a process of differential unraveling already underway, this pillar addresses the most urgently practical: the design of legal protocols for the orderly decorporatization of zombie infrastructures and economies, and the protection of the fabrics of life during the transition.
Our mission:
We do not seek to stabilize what collapses, but to accompany what emerges.
Anticipate extreme scenarios and systemic failures.
Activate transdisciplinary communities of practice.
Recognize the legal agency of hybrid ecosystems, algorithms, and infrastructures.
Design regulatory tools for contexts of collapse and transition.
Produce experimental legal artifacts such as adaptive contracts, local constitutions, and emergency protocols.
Anthropocene Law Starts Here
Why a new law?
The infrastructures that sustain our societies—material and digital, legal and energy—were designed for an era of stability that has ended. Today, we face scenarios of discontinuity, emergence, and mutation. Traditional law, centered on permanence and human control, is no longer sufficient.
The LDE·IR proposes a normative mutation: a law capable of operating in uncertainty, recognizing non-human entities, and enabling processes of institutional, ecological, and technological regeneration.
Anthropocene Law
LDE·IR
We imagine the law that does not yet exist for a world that has already changed.