Equality Through Private Law?

Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law

Interfacing Private Law lecture series with Ralf Michaels (MPI Hamburg).

About the speaker Professor Bronwen Morgan is a socio-legal scholar and Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law &amp; Justice at UNSW Sydney. She joined UNSW Law School in October 2012, having previously served as Professor of Socio-legal Studies at the University of Bristol, UK, for seven years. Before her time at Bristol, she taught at the University of Oxford for six years in association with the Centre for Socio-legal Studies and held positions at both St Hilda’s College (1999–2001) and Wadham College (2002–2005). Earlier in her career, she taught at the University of Sydney Law School.Professor Morgan’s research focuses on transformations of the regulatory state, law and governance, and the interaction between regulation, democracy and sustainability. Her work has explored diverse and solidarity-based economies, regulatory responses to climate change, and legal models for social enterprise and new economic formations. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, has held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, and is actively engaged in networks such as the New Economy Network of Australia and Regen Sydney.Abstract This paper traces the architecture of a legal infrastructure capable of nurturing and supporting regenerative economies by weaving together threads from six interrelated keywords: sharing, platforms, value, place, care and time. Each keyword signals a blend of concept and practice, and a conception of law that is as much about institutional imagination as about regulation and control and constraint. In offering practical examples of constructive legal frameworks that help craft a regenerative economy, I draw on secondary data analysis of my own research conducted a decade ago (2012-2015) of 10 case studies of social enterprises founded by social activists responding to climate change, combined with a longitudinal perspective from fresh interviews (2023-24) with selected participants from this earlier research. Combined with insights from mapping current trajectories of regenerative economy advocacy, including data analysis of four focus groups convened in 2022 of professionals in law, public policy, finance and the built environment, the paper will argue that the legal lineaments of value, sharing and platforms tend towards extraction but open up regenerative pathways when interwoven with place, care and time. The legal infrastructure articulated points to a new kind of civic law, neither private nor public, that braids together non-state bottom-up imaginaries, bioregions, cities and local economies. This civic law has a dual face that integrates formal-legal instrumentalism and pluralistic, collective forms of lawful life. Practices related to platforms, sharing and value offer the most opportunity for formal legal innovation, especially re personal property law, employment law and ownership structures for economic enterprise. By contrast, place, care and time demand interrelated practices that flourish best as either tacit ethos or soft law forms of guidance or internal governance. Bioregional governance of place and institutional practices of care can be enabled by soft law guidance (eg nature-positive benchmarks, internal accounting practices), while time links formal law and plural legalities. Ownership structures for economic enterprise alter the salience of time – by prioritising participation, shared decision-making and collaboration over competition, profit-maximisation and growth – such that platforms and value possess institutional breathing space for practices that prioritise mutual care or respond to place. They literally create time to care (for each other and non-humans) and to be (in place).

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Equality Through Private Law?

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