Workshop: Environmental Law in the Academy

The theme of this year’s Journal of Environmental Law workshop, hosted in conjunction with the UCL Centre for Law and Environment, is ‘Environmental Law in the Academy’. Environmental law is a thriving, dynamic, and multi-faceted area of academic practice. In this workshop, we explore the different dimensions of academic environmental law and its future trajectories by bringing together a group of leading experts in environmental law. 

Agenda

12:30 PM - Lunch 

1:30 PM -  Environmental Law Communities 

Chair: Professor Liz Fisher, University of Oxford

• Academic environmental lawyers have a range of different potential audiences. In this first panel we explore some of those different audiences with a panel including Laura Gyte and Joss Saunders (Oxfam) and Professor Elen Stokes (Cardiff).

2:20 PM -  Environmental Law Text Book Writing 

Chair: Professor Eloise Scotford, UCL

• Writing textbooks is not often perceived as cutting-edge academic scholarship.  In this panel, we explore how writing textbooks for environmental law is a complex, challenging, and inspiring intellectual pursuit for scholars at the frontier of the subject. Panellists include Professor Stuart Bell (York), Professor Jan Jans (Groningen), Professor Donald McGillivray (Sussex) and Professor Catherine Redgwell (Oxford).

3:10 pm - Coffee

3:40 PM -  Environmental Law Teaching 

Chair: Dr Steven Vaughan, UCL

• This session provides a space for thinking about environmental law teaching, including: its relationships to environmental law scholarship; what legal education scholarship can tell us about environmental law teaching; and the where and how of environmental law teaching in the UK. Panelists include William Twining (UCL) and recent UCL Laws graduates

4:30 Public Service and Environmental Law

Chair: Professor Maria Lee, UCL

• In this session, we think about the place of environmental law academics in helping to make the world a better place. Often considered in terms of ‘impact’, and perhaps increasingly in terms of ‘knowledge exchange’, we shall instead assess our role as public servants. We seek to ask questions about the distinctive contributions we are able to make as academics, and the particular challenges of using our complex and hard won understanding of the world in the service of public ends. Our panellists have different experiences of and perspectives on public service and include Emily Barritt (King’s College London), Richard Macrory (UCL) Sharon Turner (formerly European Climate Foundation).

5:20 PM - Presentation of the Richard Macrory Prize for Best Article in the JEL 2018

5:30 PM - DRINKS