Performance and Pedagogy in the Wild Law Judgment Project

In 2014, the wild law judgment project was launched at a workshop in Sydney. The project was inspired by an assemblage of judgment rewriting projects, most significantly the feminist judgment writing projects, which have involved feminist rewritings of judgments from all areas of law. There have been antecedents to the feminist judgment writing projects and the wild law judgment project is not the only recent by-product or extension of these projects; for instance, in a 2016 Australian publication authors have experimented with the rewriting of the same Australian constitutional law judgment from a number of different theoretical perspectives, including but not restricted to feminist perspectives.
The key difference and defining characteristic of the wild law judgment project is that all contributors have brought a ‘wild law’ or Earth-centred perspective to bear in rewriting existing judgments or, in some instances, in constructing hypothetical and even futuristic judgments. This is arguably a more challenging proposition than a feminist rewriting, given that the feminist judge (assuming that she is a woman) can at least to some extent extrapolate from her ‘own gendered experience’ but wild judges cannot extrapolate from anything except a human experience in seeking to critique the prevailing anthropocentric focus of all laws. How do we interpret or deconstruct our existing law/laws wildly, such that humanity is not necessarily the primary focus? How do we disregard our own self-interest, our ingrained assumptions and presuppositions as part of the human species, and indeed as part of a particular subset of the human species, to prioritise or at least recognise and respect Earth and its many communities and lifeforms in the process of wildly rewriting law?