Online | International Environmental Law: Changing Context, Emerging Trends & Expanding Frontiers

Speaker: Professor Lavanya Rajamani (University of Oxford)
Chair: Dr Ralph Wilde (UCL Laws)

About the lecture

This talk will explore and illustrate the ways in which international environmental law has evolved over the last decade. It will discuss how the field has adapted to a changing geo-political context, as well as to the possibilities and limits of global regulation in addressing the complex, polycentric and intractable nature of global environmental harms. It will also explore the increasing activity at the intersections of international environmental law with other fields of law and policy, thus expanding the sites at which international environmental law is made, applied and implemented. It will conclude with reflections on the future of international environmental law in the context of the emerging understanding of the fundamental limits posed by the nature and operation of environmental law within the current architecture of international law and politics.

This talk builds on the remarkable contributions of over 70 authors across the world to the forthcoming second edition of the Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law (Lavanya Rajamani and Jacqueline Peel (editors), OUP, spring 2021). The Oxford Handbook has 67 chapters spanning the breadth of international environmental law - context, analytical approaches, conceptual pillars, normative development, issue areas, actors, inter-linkages with other regimes, compliance and effectiveness, and international environmental law in national and international courts.

About the speaker

Lavanya Rajamani is a Professor of International Environmental Law, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and Yamani Fellow in Public International Law, St Peter's College, Oxford. She was formerly a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, where she now holds a Visiting Professorship.

Lavanya researches, teaches and practices in the field of international environmental and climate change law. She has authored several books and articles in this field. Her latest book features in the Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International Law/Receuil des Cours, under the title, Innovation and Experimentation in the International Climate Change Regime (July, 2020). Her earlier co-authored book International Climate Change Law (OUP, 2017), won the 2018 ASIL Certificate of Merit in a Specialized  Area of International Law. The Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law co-edited with Jacqueline Peel, has been submitted to OUP, and is due out in early 2021.

Lavanya also serves as Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (Chapter 14: International Cooperation). She has served as Rapporteur of the ILA Committee on Legal Principles Relating to Climate Change (2008-2014) and as a consultant to the UN Climate Secretariat, a negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, and a legal adviser to the Chairs of Ad Hoc Working Groups under the Framework Convention on Climate Change. She was part of the UN Climate core drafting and advisory team for the 2015 Paris Agreement.

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