Ecolaw: Legality, Life, and the Normativity of Nature, By Margaret Davies, London: Routledge, 2022, x + 128 pp.

• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Author: Rens Claerhoudt
• Date: 01 April 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12493

processes in a transformative legal praxis. This can be done by decon-

structing, dismantling and reconstructing the ontological and episte-

mological assumptions that produce universal legal knowledge and

concepts of the globe. We then need to ask what constitutes legal

knowledge, what its purpose ought to be while we transition into the

planetary, who is systematically able to frame such knowledge, and

who does it burden and benefit systematically (i.e. how such knowl-

edge distributes the responsibilities and burdens of the Anthropocene

across various species, humans, scales, and temporalities). Here, I use

‘who’to discursively refer to privileged and underprivileged humans

and nonhumans. The objective should be to displace the ideological

supremacy of human species, Euroamerican and universalistic cosmol-

ogies, and simultaneously further the plurality of human-nonhuman

relations, minority thought and just political action. Chakrabarty's

book is one essential step in this direction.

DOI: 10.1111/reel.12493

Ecolaw: Legality, Life, and the Normativity of

Nature

By Margaret Davies, London: Routledge, 2022,

x+128 pp.

Rens Claerhoudt

Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Email: r.f.claerhoudt@tilburguniversity.edu

What would law become if ecological thinking—in which ‘everything

is connected to everything else’(at i)—would be the starting point? In

her book EcoLaw, Margaret Davies takes the reader on a legal–

philosophical journey towards ‘a new way to understand law’(at i). To

make this theoretical issue more tangible, Davies chooses an

illustrative guide species that is as exceptional as one could wish for:

slime moulds. These extraordinary organisms are not fungi, despite

their resemblance, nor are they animals or plants. They lack brains,

but they are capable of social behaviour. Because of their peculiar

appearance, they are granted with some juicy nicknames which, fortu-

nately, Davies does not omit to mention (dog vomit and scrambled

egg). The book is divided into five chapters. EcoLaw opens by present-

ing a philosophical foundation for what is suggested as ‘living law’

(at 16). It then considers the agency or normativity of nonhuman and

nonliving entities, followed by a legal–theoretical reflection in the

conclusion.

In Chapter 1, Davies introduces the slime mould as a tool to illus-

trate her argument. Using slime moulds allows Davies to show that all

nonhumans—and not just megafauna species like panda bears and

dolphins—are part of the human normative world. This normativity

should not be interpreted in a narrow legal fashion, in which norms

tend to refer to what law ought to be. Rather, drawing on philosopher

George Canguilhem, Davies refers to the normative as ‘processes

which create norms in an evolving nomos’(at 29, original emphases).

Following Robert Cover, Davies calls the normative world the nomos,

as referring to ‘the idea that “nature”—animals, plants, the Earth, and

so forth—produces its own values and norms, and that human norms

are part of this natural nomos’(at 1). Here, a norm is understood as ‘a

pattern, standard, or direction, that is also a guide for action’(at 4).

Further assessment reveals that a norm is constructed through ‘itera-

tion or continued usage’, that norms are closely connected to other

organisms and matter, and that norms contain a ‘purpose-driven

action or action that follows a direction’(at 4). Norms thus have an

‘iterative, connective and teleological’character (at 4), while at the

same time, norms may continually change. The example of slime

moulds illustrates this nomos. The life of a slime mould is constructed

by norms, but it is also perceptive to change, for example, due to

human norms and actions. Vice versa, humans, with their own norms,

may be affected by slime moulds. Altogether, Earth is full of entangled

norms of countless organisms and nonliving matter.

Against this philosophical backdrop, Davies proceeds to construct

her argument in Chapter 2 by retrieving an ‘obsolete’understanding

of nature (at 39), namely, one that extends to the entire cosmos. The

neglect of this definition of nature is a consequence of Enlightenment

thinking, in which the meaning of ‘nature’was narrowed down to

human nature, thus separating the teleological human nomos from a

nonhuman world perceived as mechanical, as depicted by philoso-

phers such as René Descartes.

To further develop the normativity that connects nature and law,

Davies turns in Chapter 3 to Canguilhem. He argued that every living

organism ‘creates and lives by its own norms’(at 59), with the desire

to live without pain as the common threshold. In EcoLaw, the rele-

vance of Canguilhem's work and his notion of ‘vital normativity’

(at 58) lies in the capacity to create norms that every living organism

possesses, a point that Davies also extends to the nonliving. Jakob

von Uexküll also considered nonhuman life as being more than simply

a mechanical form of life. He attributed to each animal its own unique

Umwelt, an environment or bubble filled with particular subjective

information. Although the Umwelts of members of the same species

often seem similar, no two Umwelts are identical. The work of these

philosophers still has a lot to offer today, but Davies accurately notes

that contemporary Western understanding of intraspecies and inter-

species relationships has departed from the 20th century paradigms

that both Canguilhem and von Uexküll embraced.

This is demonstrated in the particularly interesting Chapter 4 on

the nonliving nature and its normativity, in which Davies reveals the

‘biochauvinism’of both philosophers (at 74). Canguilhem only granted

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