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The study of catastrophe is a growth industry. Today, cosmologists scan the heavens for asteroids of the kind that smashed into earth some ninety million years ago, leading to the swift extinction of the dinosaurs. Climatologists create elaborate models of the chaotic weather and vast flooding that will result from the continued buildup of greenhouse gases in the planet's atmosphere. Terrorist experts and homeland security consultants struggle to prepare for a wide range of possible biological, chemical, and radiological attacks: aerated small pox virus spread by a crop duster, botulism dumped into an urban reservoir, a dirty bomb detonated in a city center. Yet, strangely, law's role in the definition, identification, prevention, and amelioration of catastrophe has been largely neglected. The relationship between law and other limiting conditions—such as states of emergency—has been the subject of rich and growing literature. By contrast, little has been written about law and catastrophe. In devoting a volume to the subject, the chapters sketch the contours of a relatively fresh terrain of inquiry. This book begins the work of developing a jurisprudence of catastrophe.

Taking natural disaster as the political and legal norm is uncommon. Taking a person who has become unstable and irrational during a disaster as the starting point for legal analysis is equally uncommon. Nonetheless, this book makes the unsettling case that the law demands an ecstatic subject and that natural disaster is the endpoint to law. Developing an idiosyncratic but compelling new theory of legal and political existence, the book challenges existing arguments that, whether valedictory or critical, have posited the rational, bounded self as the normative subject of law. By bringing a distinctive, accessible reading of contemporary political philosophy to bear on source material in several European and Middle Eastern languages, the book constructs a cogent analysis of natural disaster and its role in modern subject formation. In the process, it opens up exciting new lines of inquiry in the fields of law, politics, and gender studies. This book represents a promising new development in the interdisciplinary study of law.

Although many developing countries have environmental statutes, regulations, and resolutions on the books, these laws are rarely enforced and often ignored. This volume presents a book-length treatment of an innovative prosecutorial institution, the Brazilian Ministrio Publico, which refashioned itself in the 1980s into a powerful defender of citizen rights in environmental protection, as well as in other areas of public interest such as disability rights, consumer protection, and anticorruption. In Brazil, the offices of prosecutors and courts have become an important forum for resolving environmental conflicts, making environmental law more effective than in the past. Court involvement communicates the end of impunity for violators. It increases the accountability of governmental agencies and provides legal access for citizen complaints. In short, it enhances environmental rule of law. As developing countries continue to seek to reform their legal systems to strengthen democracy and the rule of law, the Brazilian Ministrio Publico must be recognized as a very promising model.