Laughing at Law: A Case for Comic Jurisprudence in the Climate Crisis

Critical legal scholars and activists do a lot with law: we ‘trash’ it, we resist it, we dissect it, we occasionally (reluctantly) appeal to it — we also laugh at it, albeit less systematically. This laughter, I argue, is valuable — and we would benefit from making a method out of it. I show how this might be done with reference to a rambling and ongoing legal story: the 56 judgements related to Indigenous and allied opposition to Canada’s notoriously controversial Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project. Interpreting this as a chain novel of sorts (with a cast of characters that would put Tolstoy to shame), I demonstrate how engaging with law through a comic lens can help us ‘deal’ with the seeming immovability of modern Western law’s most self- (and other-) destructive tendencies in the context of the climate crisis. This comic mode/mood of engagement — characterised by flexibility and life-orientation — stands in contrast to the rigidity and linearity of the tragic vision that dominates modern Western law. The comic vision shows us that we can engage fruitfully with a tragic, coercive law by declining to take it seriously — because, ultimately, this law can be ‘tricked’ into serving higher objectives than its own rule.