The European Legal Laboratory for the Commons is a collective of citizen groups, activists, and lawyers (including lawyers, professors, and doctoral students) involved in civil society. All are guided by the desire to preserve and promote the commons, on their territory and beyond.
They come from France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Belgium … and have imagined the first steps of the legal laboratory during the CommonsCamp in Marseille (January 2020).
The intention of the Legal Laboratory is to help the preservation and development of the commons through the legal lever. It is a question of mixing legal expertise and expertise of use (empirical knowledge) in a dynamic of reflexivity and, if need be, of creativity of the law, based on a comparative approach (national and European)
The final objective is to strengthen the common ground by documenting the situations encountered, disseminating them and thus enabling learning by example…
Methodology
The method used is similar to that of the Juristes Embarqués (the two dynamics are concomitant):
Using an analysis grid of situations identified in France and elsewhere in Europe, identify the legal obstacles to the preservation and/or development of the commons.
From the cross-views (enriched by the plurality of actors and territories represented) of empirical knowledge and legal knowledge, to initiate reflections and to provide tracks of solutions, in the best case, reproducible.
There is no restriction as to the sectors concerned (natural commons, urban commons, digital commons….)
A time of restitution of the work is planned for September 2021.
A dedicated documentation platform will be put online soon.
Contact : contact(at)babalex.org