Nicholas Stump (West Virginia University - College of Law) has posted Ecosocialism, Degrowth, and Global South Thought: Critical Legal Transformations (49 William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review (forthcoming 2025) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Article explores how Critical Legal Research (CLR) can help drive transformations of our ecological political economy towards true system change. CLR, in the first place, unveils how the hegemonic legal research regime is structured to support dominant societal interests (i.e., white patriarchal capitalism). CLR helps to unveil these dynamics, while also offering novel and potent approaches to help transcend this regime in ultimate pursuit of radical social change. These transformative approaches include reliance on diverse alternative resources and adoption of collectivist and grassroots-based research approaches. After articulating the CLR framework, this Article explores its potential in the context of leading and intertwined bodies of theory for transformative change: ecosocialism, degrowth, and Global South and Indigenous thought. Next, this Article offers concrete avenues to help pursue such emancipatory change—i.e., specifically focusing on the popular conception of an "ecosocialist transition." Ecosocialist transition strategies include non-reformist reforms, dual power, a radical just transition, and joining ecosocialism with a broader global movement of movements. As this Article contends, such ecosocialist transition strategies can be powerfully informed by CLR via embedding CLR within bottom-up forms of socio-legal praxis, such as radical movement lawyering. Ultimately, such CLR praxis constitutes an emerging and vital, yet still largely underutilized, dimension in the struggles to combat white patriarchal capitalism and to pursue ecologically viable and socially emancipatory futures.
