Facing new technological and environmental actors in Parliament, a Latourian perspective

Does the legislative branch still have a relevance in the years to come? How can we build the Parliament of tomorrow, sufficiently constrained while equally adequately free of reigns? This paper will address this issue following the philosophy and methodology of Bruno Latour (1947-2022). I will look at how constitutional law can accommodate a proper place to new actors in the parliamentary processes: namely non-human actors. Both IAs and natures (the plural form is important) invade our lives but are still treated as ‘objects’ by public law. I claim that public law can be leveraged so as to include those actors into the legislative fabric by giving them a voice through a “group talker” (Latour, Politics of nature) in the sense of the Actor-Network-Theory (Latour, Reassembling the social). For this purpose, we must first reconcile parliamentary studies with the proper “modes of existence” that public law shares with those new actors. The difficulty is that LAW and POLitics as specific modes of cognition comprising a set of rules of veridiction and of felicity/infelicity (Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence), cannot account for IA, usually classified in the mode of “TEChnology” and natures that are part of the mode of REProduction (ibid.). If Parliaments are also “legal laboratories” that allows the “passage of law” (Latour, An Ethnology of the Council of State), we must try to pinpoint the existence of “black boxes” (Latour, Science in Action) that until now prevents those actors to enter the realm of legal process. Eventually, my research tries to counteract the growing trend of ‘legal efficiency’ relying on ‘grand explanations’ such as cybernetics (Alain Supiot), legal endogeneity (Lauren Edelman), or law & economics, to name but a few, in order to compose a new collective in which the unloved legislative branch can proudly face Gaia and the future (Latour, Facing Gaia).