This is a summary of the paper "Protecting future generations: A global survey of legal academics" by Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter.
As longtermists, we believe it is crucial to shape the long-term future for the better. Legal longtermists are particularly interested in how the law can be used to safeguard the interests of future generations and improve the lives of people in the coming centuries and millennia. In “Protecting future generations”, Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter find that legal academics tend to believe that future generations deserve greater legal protections.
Do future generations deserve more protection?
Longtermism is the idea that we should focus on making the future better. This is because the future is
incredibly important––and if we can make it better in predictable ways, then we could impact the lives of billions
or trillions of people. Legal longtermists focus on how legal systems can protect future generations and
improve the long-run future. This survey looks at a few open questions in legal longtermism––for example, can and
should the law protect future generations? To answer these questions, Martínez and Winter surveyed 516 legal experts
from top English-speaking and common-law universities around the world.Most of the participants were professors (88.6%), and they
came from Europe, Oceania, and the Americas, with some from Asia (9.3%) and Africa (5.2%). Most were at
least somewhat liberal (80.4%). Some questions were answered by fewer participants, but they were unlikely a
result of chance. Results were also mostly consistent across different demographics––but some questions were
answered differently by participants living in Asia.
Legal systems tend not to protect future generations.One exception to this tendency is constitutional law. Around one third of all constitutions
mention future generations, usually for environmental protections––but even in countries with strong
constitutional protections, these protections are not enforced. See Araújo and Koessler (2021).
For example, in the United States, cost benefit analysis is used to make regulatory
decisions––but the process “discounts” away the interests of future generationsOffice of Management and Budget (2003).
in a way seems unjustified to most philosophers.See Parfit (1984), Cowen & Parfit (1992), Broome (1994) and Mogensen (2019). Many
economists also agree, see Drupp et al. (2018).
In the legal system, one of the most important rights is the ability to take legal action. In the United States, this
right can be invoked when you are harmed or placed in immediate danger. Harms to future generations don't fit this
criteria.Other places have different
requirements, but nowhere explicitly allows future generations to sue.
However, over two-thirds of surveyed legal experts thought there was some legal basis for people
in the next 100 years to sue, in at least some cases. Strikingly, more than half also thought the same was true for
those living more than 100 years from now. This may indicate opportunities to assert the rights of future
generations with the right cases and arguments.It's also possible that there are similarly strong arguments against the legal basis for
future generations to sue, or that judges are applying the law incorrectly.
However, future generations have never been allowed to sue (Bogojević, 2020), and legal experts think that future generations should be protected more than they are today. On average, future generations are only protected a third as much as they should be––according to legal experts. They thought that the current generation should be protected more than they are now, and more than future generations should be. They also found that other groups, like animals and people from other countries, are not protected as much as they should be, but future generations are by far the most neglected by the law.
Protecting future generations
The law sometimes has long-term effects, for example, ancient Roman law still influences many civil law systems
(Watson 1991). In other cases, effects may be short or unpredictable.For instance, constitutions only last around 17 years on
average, and several of the founding fathers were sceptical that the US constitution would last more than a
generation. See Elkins et. Al. (2009).
For the legal longtermist, everything hinges on whether the law provides predictable and feasible
ways to help future generations. Legal experts think the law can provide protection to future generations, and that
it is one of the best ways to predictably help future generations. Martínez and Winter estimateHere they randomly sample from the responses to
correct for certain distribution types––using a bias-corrected
and accelerated bootstrap to generate confidence intervals.
that around 74% of legal academics somewhat agree that the law can help people more than a
century from today. While about 73% somewhat agree that legal methods are among the most predictable and feasible
ways of doing so. About 41% somewhat agree there are even ways for the law to protect people who are a millennium
away!Interestingly, 55% thought that
environmental law––one of the most promising areas––had a hope of protecting the further future. This
perhaps indicates that when these questions were asked in an abstract way experts tended to underestimate
how helpful the law could be.
Next, Martínez and Winter explored the most promising areas of law from the perspective of legal longtermism. Many
show at least some promise––for each area in the survey at least half of legal academics would somewhat agree that
area could be helpful. However, legal academics were most confident in environmental law and constitutional law. The
most promising constitutional mechanisms are ensuring that 1% of GDP goes towards safeguarding humanity against
existential risks or giving explicit legal standing to future generations.They also asked about protecting future generations from
discrimination, spending 1% of GDP to protect against existential risks, granting explicit standing to
future generations, creating a commision to oversea the protection of future generation, and establishing
the explicit state goal of protecting the future.
However, the differences here were small.
Finally, they asked about causes that longtermists tend to find important, to identify the most promising ones for legal intervention. Although at least half of the academics thought all the areas might be helped, they had lower confidence in artificial intelligence (56%) than the others––for instance, climate change (84%).
Conclusion
Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter surveyed legal academics and found that they generally believe that future generations deserve more protection. The law provides a promising avenue for providing these protections––in particular environmental and constitutional law. Future research could explore the attitudes of different groups towards legal longtermism, try to compare specific policies rather than broad areas of law, or investigate other legal concepts such as personhood.
Bibliography
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