Towards a Sustainable Social Law: What Role for Legal Scholars?

Abstract

This article outlines an initial research agenda for legal researchers who intend to contribute to the shaping of a ‘sustainable social law’. This notion refers to a social law system that continues to meet the challenges of social justice, without transgressing planetary boundaries and endangering ecosystems. The development of the research agenda is based on two observations. First, the transformation of social law into a sustainable discipline will require its emancipation from the productivist ideology according to which human well-being depends on constant increase in production. Second, social law is pluralist and therefore contains, at its margins, mechanisms that deviate from productivism and can help frame a sustainable future. On this basis, the proposed research agenda is centred on the comparison and classification of non-productivist time-spaces that are already protected by social law, or could become so, through the unfolding of creative legal interpretations. Social law is also approached as a category for analysing equality issues in times of ecological transition, according to the distribution of non-productivist time-spaces it institutes between individuals. Finally, legal scholars could investigate, in empirical studies, whether resistance to the productivist imperative could explain the uses, illegal or not, and non-uses of social law measures by individuals. Sustainable Social Law, Productivism, Non-productivist Time-Spaces, Non-Take-Up of Social Rights; Welfare Fraud; Global Warming, Ecological Transition, ; Eco-social Policies