After the Law

This chapter, as a contribution to the present volume on hypothetical judgments in the post-Anthropocene, imagines this possibility somewhat differently. It does so by imagining a scenario without the modern legal system altogether. The reasoning for this is rooted in the author's understanding of the impossibility of subjectivity of law – as it is practised, learned, and studied as a discipline – and therefore the impossibility of it approximating the post-Anthropocene. My conjecture is rooted in the understanding of law as one of human social systems. The Law is attempting to change towards various engagements with the nonhuman, posthuman, rights of nature, digital realities, artificial intelligence, and so on. This change, however, is able to consider absorption and inclusion of these narratives only as part of the self-repeating jurisprudential language, and existing well-established formalities, rules, and procedures of the legal discipline. Environmental degradation is a response of the nonhuman to human activities, and this response does not rely on human understanding of the law, nor does it consult the human; ‘it’, or to use the better term, the actual Earth System, reacts in accordance with laws complex and simple, chemical reactions, physical reactions, biological, and so on. The complex Earth System approach centres on how the relationships among parts give rise to the collective behaviours of a system, and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment.