Environmental law in the glasshouse: A decade of the environmental information regulations 2004

The UCL Centre for Law and the Environment Annual Lecture Series is being launched in 2015 as a platform for the development and showcasing of contemporary environmental law scholarship. The Lectures are delivered on an annual basis and cover a wide range of environmental law scholarship and methodological approaches to law.

About this talk

The Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR), as with other information rights legislation, has now been fully in force for over a decade.

The starting assumption for these different regimes is that they are straightforward mechanisms that balance a general right of disclosure against limited reasons for non-disclosure.

The end result is presumed to be greater clarity about environmental governance. But a decade’s worth of Information Commissioner decision notices, and tribunal and court decision reveals the opposite.

The application of the EIR regime is underpinned by assumptions about good environmental governance and its operation leads to a questioning of the structure and nature of environmental governance.

This paper draws on a century’s worth of experience with glass in architecture to show that this is inevitable and not a negative.

But it does mean that the EIR cannot be understood as simply cutting a window into the side of government to reveal what is inside. Rather EIR and related regimes need to be understood as architectural structures that force us to reflect on the malleable and complex nature of environmental law.

About the speaker

Liz Fisher, BA/LLB (UNSW), D Phil (Oxon) is Professor of Environmental Law at Corpus Christi College and UL lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.

She researches in the areas of environmental law, risk regulation and administrative law. Much of her work has explored the interrelationship between law, administration and regulatory problems.

Her work has an important comparative dimension and she focuses in particular on these issues in the legal cultures of the UK, US, Australia, the EU, and the WTO.

Her 2007 book, Risk Regulation and Administrative Constitutionalism, won the SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2008.

Recent work has focused on the problems created by interdisciplinarity in regulatory decision-making including the use of models in environmental regulation and the operational consequences of transparency in administrative law.

She won an Oxford University Teaching Award in 2009 and was shortlisted for OUP National Law Teacher of the Year Award 2011.

She is General Editor of the Journal of Environmental Law and has served as the editor of the Legislation and Reports Section of the Modern Law Review.