CLP - Is Environmental Law Hopeful?

This lecture will be delivered by Professor Elen Stokes, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2025-26

Speaker: Prof. Elen Stokes (University of Bristol)
Chair: Professor Robert Lee (University of Birmingham)

About the lecture

Environmental law is not a subject known for its good news stories. It deals with some of the gravest challenges facing humanity — among them, climate change, biodiversity loss and resource scarcity — which place unprecedented demands on practices and institutions of governance and forms of legal order. Environmental law is routinely confronted with its own limitations. It is also increasingly seen as part of the problem. The situation invites, or demands, engagement with the possibility that things may become otherwise — not as a form of denial or wishful thinking, but rather as a way of interrupting the status quo and reorienting to questions of hope. In my lecture, I want to explore what might be gained by thinking about hope in this context. My aim is to reflect on various ways in which the relationship between environmental law and hope could be framed, by inquiring into the forms that hope takes in environmental law, and by asking whether hope also has a role to play in environmental law teaching and research.

Elen Stokes is a Professor in Environmental Law at the University of Bristol Law School, where she is also a Deputy Head of School and Co-director of the Centre for Environmental Law and Sustainability. Elen teaches and researches environmental law, and has a long-standing interest in how legal rules and institutions relate to, act on and make particular futures. She has undertaken research projects on the regulation of technologies for government departments and other public bodies. Her current work is on the relationships between law and hope.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.

You can attend this event in-person at UCL Faculty of Laws (Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1H 0EG) or alternatively you can join via a live stream.

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Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay