Bronwen Morgan | Legal imagination
Corporate inventiveness may have brought wealth and prosperity to many, but the damage wrought by the cumulative extraction of our current economic system is both painfully visible and intensely urgent.
We are in the midst of a climate emergency, so it’s about time we wrote a new social contract that will bring our economy into line with what the planet can afford. To create a regenerative economy where humanity can thrive, we are going to need something called legal imagination – the ability to weave rules, entitlements and principles into responsive and creative structures. Think of a world where rivers had human rights, corporations were regulated by their stakeholders, ecocide was a crime and money looked entirely different. Where can legal imagination take us?
A UNSW Centre for Ideas project, with illustrations designed by Juune Lee and footage filmed at the EPICentre – a UNSW research centre located at the Art & Design campus. Videos filmed and edited by Paper Moose, and podcast editing and music composition by Bryce Halliday.
Bronwen Morgan
Bronwen Morgan is Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney in the Faculty of Law & Justice, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and a prior Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She is a socio-legal scholar with a longstanding interest in regulation and governance, changes in state formation and the increasing economisation of political discourse and practices. She co-leads the New Economy Network of Australia, Regen Sydney and the Collaborative Research Network on Utopian Legality, Prefigurative Politics and Radical Governance under the umbrella of the Law and Society Association. She is a co-editor in chief of the interdisciplinary journal Global Social Challenges.