ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter draws together the findings from across the book. I ask whether existing approaches to alcohol and other drug habits in the law are just and if not, how we might begin to articulate an overarching vision for how things might be done otherwise. As a move in this direction, I introduce the concept of ‘onto-advocacy’ – an approach that combines ideas from the ‘ontological turn’ in alcohol and other drug studies and social science research with critical approaches to legal ethics. Onto-advocacy takes as its foundational premise the notion that legal practices do not simply describe or address pre-existing realities but actively participate in constituting them; acknowledges that what becomes in the world through legal practices is a profoundly political and ethical problem; encourages modes of lawyering (and judging) that harness law’s constitutive power, and that protects and cares for the legal ‘truths’ that result; and is work done in meaningful and explicit collaboration with drug user organisations and peers wherever possible, guided by the principle of ‘nothing about us without us’. It calls for a deliberate leveraging of law’s ontological fragility, and a rethink of lawyering in light of the power lawyers hold to constitute objects, subjects and outcomes.
