IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cog/poango/v12y2024a7839.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Facing the Future: Conceiving Legal Obligations Towards Future Generations

Author

Listed:
  • Svenja Behrendt

    (Department of Public Law, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Germany)

Abstract

Conceiving legal obligations towards future generations is challenging—especially from a positivist stance and if obligations and claims are understood as being correlative in nature. Legal obligations towards future generations are often rejected from the outset if (and insofar as) there is no explicit acknowledgement or established doctrine. This neglects the power of sound legal interpretation. I argue that obligations towards future people and generations are grounded in the relational character of human rights and that their positivity is not a problem in a legal order containing norm texts that can reasonably be interpreted as acknowledging human rights; no additional enactment is necessary for these obligations to be part of the positive law. This claim is based on a (novel) concept of fundamental rights which is compatible with legal positivism.

Suggested Citation

  • Svenja Behrendt, 2024. "Facing the Future: Conceiving Legal Obligations Towards Future Generations," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 12.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:poango:v12:y:2024:a:7839
    DOI: 10.17645/pag.7839
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/7839
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.17645/pag.7839?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tomohiro Tasaki & Yasuko Kameyama, 2024. "Considering Future Generations in Democratic Governance," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 12.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:poango:v12:y:2024:a:7839. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira or IT Department (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.