What Harvard Law Students Need to Know About the Commons | The Record

"Over the past twenty years in American politics, it has become increasingly clear that even conventional liberals (or 'progressives') are not going to produce the kinds of transformative change that our society really needs. Conventional public policy and law have been largely captured by the two major political parties, which themselves are both in tight collusion with business elites. I call it the Market/State duopoly, the incestuous alliance of the two great forms of power in our country, in a tacit collusion against genuine democratic participation and citizen control. To be sure, we can’t simply walk away from politics, policy and law; they remain vital arenas of engagement. But our politics today is too structurally compromised to produce much significant change. As Senator Elizabeth Warren has said, the game is rigged. We live in a time of predatory business organizations, poorly performing government institutions, moribund democratic participation, and slow-motion ecological collapse. So how to move forward? I have come to see great value in seeing our political and legal challenges through the lens of the commons. One general way to understand the commons is as everything that we inherit or create together, which we must pass on, undiminished, to future generations. Our common wealth consists of countless resources that we share such as public lands, federally funded research, the atmosphere, the oceans, the airwaves used by broadcasters. The commons should be understood as a social and political system for managing that shared wealth, with an emphasis on self-governance, fairness and sustainability. The commons is also a worldview and ethic that is ancient as the human race but as new as the Internet ..."