Cole Parker

Consider the following Christmas miracle: Bob Cratchit has a long-term mortgage with Scrooge & Marley Bank. Bob Cratchit dies and there is a default on the mortgage. The mortgaged residence then passes to his son, Tiny Tim, by operation of law. Tiny Tim files for chapter 13 and includes the defaulted mortgage with Scrooge & Marley Bank in his plan. Scrooge & Marley Bank argues it has no claim against Tiny Tim because privity of contract is lacking, and Scrooge & Marley Bank therefore has no debtor-creditor relationship with Tiny Tim. How might the court rule?

As the consequences of ecological destruction sharpen at the hands of humanism and the dehumanization of consciousness stirs panic, scholarship seeking to uncover what mobilizes the ruinous effects of the Anthropocene continues to grow. The “material turn” spreads its roots throughout disciplines as it ages, yet its articulation in legal studies remains nascent. New materialisms are emerging as visionary replies to the rapidly changing landscape presented by modern science and technology, opening up new ways of addressing legal and philosophical challenges regarding the relationships between human and nonhuman. What does it mean to say that I own some thing? (New) materialists encourage humans to reconsider the hegemonic dominance of representationalism, problematizing classical anthropocentric assumptions about our relationship to the material world as both mistaken and the source of ongoing ecological crises. This paper aims to participate in the project to unearth Euro-Western ontological moorings––a return to matter––engaging ownership of the nonhuman as one expression of a flawed notion of our place in the material world. This paper aims to build a framework for further new materialist thinking in legal philosophy in search for a better jurisprudence.