Law, waste and value: towards a legally constructivist approach to discarded objects’ valuation

Building on the methodology of French legal historian Yan Thomas, this article examines the legal operations and classifications involved in the valuation of discarded objects known as waste. Engaging broader debates on law and value, it seeks to extend prevailing institutionalist accounts, in which law figures as a ‘coding’ infrastructure of capital, by advancing a constructivist perspective: legal classifications and legal operations do not merely describe value, they actively produce it. Legal taxonomies function not as neutral descriptions but as valuation devices, entangled with economic considerations even as they remain irreducibly juridical. Tracing the ‘passage of law’ from Roman res derelictae to contemporary EU waste categories, the article demonstrates how legal operations have, across two millennia, qualified objects to enter the more valuable legal regime sought, thereby engaging their valuation—a juridical construction entangled with economic considerations that, once denaturalised, can be undone to actively support ecological alternatives.