Building a Legal System for Sustainability

This proposal seeks seed funding for creating a new transdisciplinary program on Building a Legal System for Sustainability, or BLSS (pronounced, of course, “bliss”). The aim of this program is ambitious, as befits a New American University aiming to solve global challenges: remaking, re-imagining and then refashioning international and domestic legal systems around the globe in order to make them responsive to the demands of building sustainable human systems and proactive in providing incentives for such systems. 

The seed grant team will (i) research the potential transformative role that law can play for sustainability and that sustainability can play in law; (ii) create and publish a framing document on the intersection of law and sustainability that would lay the intellectual groundwork for BLSS; (iii) collaborate and engage with other academic units at ASU and elsewhere as well as legal practitioners to explore the implementation of sustainable practices through law; and (iv) identify and prepare proposals for funding to launch BLSS.