Mission

Our mission is to critically examine some of the greatest challenges of the XXI century: unethical and unsustainable frameworks of socio-economic governance; the rise of the attention economy and surveillance capitalism; replacing the legitimacy of norms with the legitimacy of power and of influence; the fragmentation of international law and its institutions; growing income inequality and its societal impacts; perverse and pervasive structures of power and privilege; the subversion of international trade for national gain; the manipulation of national politics for personal advantage; the concerning rise of nationalism and populism; the misappropriation of religion and religious freedoms, and the dystopian deification of the person; the diminishing standing of truth in favor of political loyalty; the erosion of political transparency and accountability; increasing animosity towards those deemed "other"; the re-emergence of Schmittian politics centered on constructed enemies.

​Archibald MacLeish once said, "the business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity."

Law exists to safeguard whatever social contract we have chosen to adhere to, in whatever form of democratic government, and to do so in accordance with the values and principles that we hold to be most dear. But as MacLeish suggests, societal life seems to require much more of Law than that. Societal life is woven from many different compromises, from competing social-ethical normative orders, like morality and religion, and from competing values such as freedom, human dignity, and even the economy as a value per se. Law exists not only to make sense of these different normative constructs that both bind and shape us, but to explore how they can work together to meet the needs of a society that is always changing, and how to make social life possible, to give it scope and even dignity.