UNNATURAL FOUNDATIONS: LEGAL EDUCATION'S ECOLOGICALLY-DISMISSIVE SUBTEXTS

摘要

The specter of accelerating environmental decline, increasingly accompanied by a full-throated, corporate-financed chorus of climate change deniers and free market fundamentalists, has prompted environmentalists to apply greater scrutiny to those forces and institutions reinforcing and abetting this revanchist phenomenon. An emerging analysis contends that legal education serves as an indispensable resource for anti-environmentalism, given that it perpetuates the production of zealous practitioners who serve as apparent values-free apparatchiks-as opposed to responsible planetary citizens-furthering an increasingly destructive corporate-development agenda. Legal education notably frustrates the fostering of environmental empathy through its continuing adherence to an anachronistic, anthropocentric curriculum conceived in a pre-ecological worldview. This curriculum thwarts earth-consciousness through reifying property, discussed within a constricted parts-and-parcels, case-analysis perspective which excludes the critical considerations of holism and interconnection.