New Centre for Law and the Environment Annual Lecture Series launched

First Annual Lecture

Environmental Law in the Glasshouse:
A Decade of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 and What It Tells Us About Environmental Law

Professor Liz Fisher, University of Oxford, Corpus Christi College

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. 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.
To read more about our speaker click here.
Read further work on this topic Liz Fisher: A Decade in the Glasshouse.

About the Centre for Law and the Environment

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Book your place online at

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/environmental-law-in-the-glasshouse-tickets-17525575468

For queries

Please email Cat Balogun (c.balogun@ucl.ac.uk), Events Coordinator, at UCL Faculty of Laws.