Growing Up
From anticipatory governance to the streets of New Orleans — and why this moment matters more than I expected
There is a concept called anticipatory governance. The short version is this: rather than waiting for a crisis to materialize, you build the infrastructure, the institutions, and the legal frameworks first; you build it before the wave hits. You treat what is coming as already arrived.
I came to law school thinking about anticipatory governance. Specifically about data — environmental data, the kind that tells you what the air smells like in St. James Parish at 3am, what the salinity of the soil reads after a flood surge, what the particulate count is in the air in an historically redlined neighborhood that has never fully flourished again. But, these communities have been told, for generations, that everything is fine. I came in thinking about who owns that information, who controls it, who gets to decide whether it survives the next election cycle; who decides what happens to it during the next corporate acquisition or the next federal website scrub?
I did not arrive with a doctrine. I came with a problem.
Last fall, a faculty member whose opinion I respect pointed me toward a competition — a chance to develop and present an early-stage research idea in a structured format, with feedback, with stakes, with an audience. It was exactly the kind of opportunity a 1L should jump at.
Truth is, I didn’t submit.
Not because the idea wasn’t there. It was there. But it wasn’t ready. And I knew, with the particular stubbornness that has followed me through every stage of my life, that I was not going to put my name — or my school’s name, or my faculty advisor’s name — on something that wasn’t fully formed. A rough draft is required, yes. But rough drafts still represent you. They still say: this is where I am. And where I was, was not yet where I needed to be.
Some people call that perfectionism and maybe it is. I call it knowing the difference between a seed and a plant. You don’t present seeds and call it a harvest.
Instead, I kept digging.
Somewhere in the Louisiana Civil Code — in articles that have existed since 1825, that predate the state’s oil industry, that predate its chemical corridor, that predate every extractive relationship that has been imposed on its land and its people — I found what I was looking for.
Article 551 defines natural fruits as things produced by the earth. Article 488 defines products as things whose production inherently diminishes the substance of what produces them. Put those two definitions next to each other and ask a simple question: when a sensor reads the air quality above a community’s land, does the act of reading diminish the land?
No. The land produces that data the same tomorrow as it did today. The salinity is still there. The particulate count is still measurable. Nothing has been taken. Nothing has been depleted.
Which means environmental sensor data is not a product. It is a fruit. And fruits, under Louisiana law, belong to the owner of the thing that produces them.
I call it the Digital Usufruct.
Searches of HeinOnline, Westlaw, and LexisNexis each return zero results for that term. It does not appear in any legal scholarship, any case law, any regulatory filing, or any legal practice material in any of the three primary legal research databases. A working paper was submitted to SSRN in February 2026 and is currently pending approval.
The doctrine is original. The seed became something.
What the Digital Usufruct does, in plain terms, is this: it uses 200 years of civilian property authority to establish that frontline and Indigenous communities — places like Cancer Alley, like the eroding coastline of Terrebonne Parish, like the neighborhoods that sit in the shadow of petrochemical plants and have been told their air is fine — legally own the environmental data their land produces. Not the corporations extracting from that land. Not the institutions monitoring it. Not even errant administrations that can delete it from a government website overnight.
The community owns it. Permanently. Because the land said so.
And because it is anchored in property law rather than regulatory law, it cannot be repealed by executive order. You cannot undo the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825 with a memo. The framework is structural, not regulatory. Durable across administrations. Immutable by design. Just this week, the Scottish Parliament passed the Digital Assets (Scotland) Act 2026, establishing that whoever holds exclusive control of a blockchain-recorded digital asset is presumed to own it. Two legal systems. Two different traditions. One conclusion. The community owns its data. The land says so — and now so does Scotland.
This is what anticipatory governance looks like when it finds its legal home.
No policies or programs. Just doctrine — just truth.
In two weeks I will be in New Orleans.
The 11th Annual HBCU Climate Change Conference, convened by the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, opens on March 18th. The theme is Legacy Rising: Charting our Future at the Crossroads of Climate and Justice.
I will be there as the student representative of Southern University Law Center — an HBCU in Baton Rouge whose presence in that room, at that table, at this moment, matters in ways I am still learning to articulate.
Dr. Robert Bullard — the father of environmental justice, the scholar who established decades ago that climate justice is social justice, and established that you cannot separate the air people breathe from the rights they are owed — will be in that building. The researchers, advocates, community organizers, and emerging scholars who are doing the most urgent work of our time will be in that building.
And I will be there with a one-page summary of a legal doctrine that didn’t exist two years ago, built from a Civil Code that is older than the state’s oil industry, designed to protect the communities that industry has treated as sacrifice zones for a century — to protect people and cultures that have been commonly reduced to figures on a quarterly report in a boardroom somewhere.
I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say it because the moment calls for clarity about what is actually at stake.
We are living through a particular kind of political moment — one in which the official acknowledgment of human-caused climate change is being systematically erased from the public record. In which the data that communities need to protect themselves is being deleted, defunded, and discredited. In which the people most at risk are being told, again, that everything is fine.
Dr. Bullard is right. Environmental justice is social justice. Climate justice is social justice. And what we need right now, more than anything, is social justice — not as an abstraction, not as a talking point, but as a legal architecture that survives the people who are trying to dismantle it.
That is what I am building. That is what this conference is about. Just an individual law student, going to New Orleans to be in that room. Because doing everything, everywhere, all at once is the only way forward. We cannot be seen to be afraid of trying. Or we will fail.
The seed became something and didn’t submit to the competition.
It grows.
Andrew J. Eller is a Juris Doctorate Candidate at Southern University Law Center, Class of 2028. He is the founder of the Coastal Commons project and the originator of the Digital Usufruct framework. He writes at The Civic Compost.
The Digital Usufruct working paper was submitted to SSRN in February 2026 and is currently pending approval. All work is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.