Environmental Law — Overview

Discussion Groups

These self-sustaining groups are an essential part of the life of our graduate school. They are organised in some cases by graduate students and in others by Faculty members and meet regularly during term, typically over a sandwich lunch, when one of the group presents work in progress or introduces a discussion of a particular issue or new case. They may also encompass guest speakers from the faculty and beyond.

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Environmental Law Discussion Group

Publications

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E Fisher, 'Administrative Law, Pluralism and the Legal Construction of Merits Review in Australian Environmental Courts and Tribunals' in Linda Pearson, Carlow Harlow and Michael Taggart (eds), Administrative Law in a Changing State: Essays in Honour of Mark Aronson ( 2008) [...]

An analysis of the merits review powers of Australian environmental courts that illustrates that such powers vary dramatically and have at least four different aspects relating to scope of review, relevant considerations, procedure and evidence.

ISBN: 9781841137872

C Axon and others, 'Building Communities: Reducing Energy Use in Tenanted Commercial Property' (2012) 40 Building Research and Information 461 [...]

DOI: 10.1080/09613218.2012.680701

Reducing energy use in tenanted commercial property requires greater understanding of ’buildings as communities’. Tenanted commercial properties represent: (1) the divergent communities that share specific buildings and (2) the organisational communities represented by multi-site landlord and tenant companies. In any particular tenanted space the opportunity for environmental change is mediated (hindered or enabled) through the lease. This discussion draws on theoretical and practical understandings of (i) the socio-legal relationships of landlords, tenants and their advisors; (ii) the real performance of engineering building services strategies to improve energy efficiency; (iii) how organisational cultures affect the ability of the sector to engage with energy efficiency strategies; and (iv) the financial and economic basis of the relationship between owners and occupiers. The transformational complexity stems from: (i) the variety of commercial building stock; (ii) the number of stakeholders (solicitors, investors, developers, agents, owners, tenants and facilities managers); (iii) the fragmentation within the communities of practice; and (iv) leasehold structures and language. An agenda is proposed for truly interdisciplinary research that brings together both the physical and social sciences of energy use in buildings so that technological solutions are made effective by an understanding of the way that buildings are used and communities behave.

ISBN: 0182-3329

S J Bright, 'Carbon Reduction and Commercial Leases in the UK' (2010) 2 International Journal of Law and the Built Environment 218 [...]

This paper explores the potential impact that the introduction of the UK’s CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme will have on a) energy use in the tenanted commercial built environment and b) the idea of the net lease.

ISBN: 1756-1450

E Fisher, Bettina Lange, Eloise Scotford and Cinnamon Carlarne, 'Maturity and Methodology: Starting a Debate about Environmental Law Scholarship' (2009) 21 Journal of Environmental Law 213 [...]

DOI: 10.1093/jel/eqp012

Many environmental law scholars perceive environmental law scholarship as immature. We discuss why this self-perception has arisen and argue that a common theme is methodology. We argue that the subject can only mature when we face its methodological challenges head on, and we identify four particular issues that have given rise to these challenges: the speed and scale of legal/regulatory change, the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, the heavy reliance in environmental law on a diverse range of governance arrangements and the multi-jurisdictional nature of the subject. We argue that there is a need for debate in the face of these challenges and identify some starting points for that debate.

ISBN: 0952-8873

E Fisher, 'Risk Regulatory Concepts and the Law' in OECD (ed), Risk and Regulatory Policy: Improving the Governance of Risk (OECD 2010) [...]

A discussion of the different roles risk regulatory concepts are playing in public administration and the legal implications of those roles.

ISBN: 9789264082922

E Fisher, 'The \'perfect storm\' of REACH: charting regulatory controversy in the age of information, sustainable development, and globalization' (2008) 11 Journal of Risk Research 541 [...]

DOI: 10.1080/13669870802086547

The European Union's new chemicals regulation, REACH, has been one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in EU history. Indeed, the debate over REACH is akin to a 'perfect storm' in that the intense controversy over it has been caused by three regulatory aspects of the regime. First, REACH privatizes information collection, provision and assessment. Second, REACH represents a significant application of sustainable development and in so doing, redefines the conditions on which the EU chemicals market operates. Third, REACH will inevitably have inter-jurisdictional impacts for both supranational and national legal cultures including trade law implications, REACH being a template for international initiatives, it being a policy/legal irritant in other jurisdictions, and it providing information for public and private action in other jurisdictions. A charting of these different aspects of the regime not only provides a more nuanced account of REACH but also provides a clearer understanding of the challenges of regulating environmental and health risks in an era of market globalization

ISBN: 1366-9877

E Fisher, Pasky Pascual and Wendy Wagner, 'Understanding Environmental Models in Their Legal and Regulatory Context ' (2010) 22 Journal of Environmental Law 251 [...]

DOI: 10.1093/jel/eqq012

Environmental models are playing an increasingly important role in most jurisdictions and giving rise to disputes. Despite this fact, lawyers and policy-makers have overlooked models and not engaged critically with them. This is a problematic state of affairs. Modelling is a semi-autonomous, interdisciplinary activity concerned with developing representations of systems and is used to evaluate regulatory behaviour to ensure it is legitimate. Models are thus relevant to lawyers and policy-makers but need to be engaged with critically due to technical, institutional, interdisciplinary and evaluative complexities in their operation. Lawyers and policy-makers must thus think more carefully about models and in doing so reflect on the nature of their own disciplines and fields.

ISBN: 0952-8873

Courses

The courses we offer in this field are:

Undergraduate

FHS - Final Year (Phase III)

The degree is awarded on the basis of nine final examinations at the end of the three-year course (or four years in the case of Law with Law Studies in Europe) and (for students who began the course in October 2011 or later) an essay in Jurisprudence written over the summer vacation at the end of the second year. Note: the Jurisprudence exam at the end of the third year is correspondingly shorter. This phase of the Final Honour School includes the first and second term of the final year; the Final Examinations are taken in the third term of the final year.

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Environmental Law

This course is an introduction to the subject of environmental law and covers the main areas of substantive UK (with the focus on England) and EC environmental law. Environmental law is concerned with the law relating to the protection of the environment and includes areas such as pollution control law, nature conservation, environmental impact assessment, and trade law. Much of the substance of UK environmental law is derived from EC law and as a subject environmental law builds on the core subjects of EC Law and Administrative Law as well as applying concepts from other areas such as criminal law and tort law.

The course will take into consideration the socio-political context that environmental law operates in and the course will explore the complex and ever expanding case law and legislation on the subject. A major theme of the course is the type of challenges that environmental problems provide for the law. In the last decade environmental law has given rise to difficult legal questions including: what should be the rights of citizens to legally challenge ‘public’ decision-making; what should be the limits of discretion placed on administrative decision-makers in their pursuit of environmental protection; how should environmental protection be weighed up against other social goals; what are the best means of achieving environmental protection; and how much regulatory autonomy should Member States have under EC law to protect the environment in the way they so wish.

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Postgraduate

BCL

Our taught postgraduate programme, designed to serve outstanding law students from common-law backgrounds

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Comparative and Global Environmental Law

Environmental law regimes now operate at the local, national, transnational and international levels in relation to a wide range of environmental problems. This course is a study of these regimes in comparative perspective so as to highlight not only the similarities and differences between them, but also the types of intellectual challenges they create for scholars and lawyers. In particular, a feature of these regimes is their legal and regulatory complexity. Topics covered include the role and nature of environmental principles; the role of courts; the nature of environmental decision-making processes (including the roles of science and participation); environmental impact assessment; nature conservation; chemicals regulation; transgenic agricultural regulation; integrated pollution control; emission trading schemes; commercial transactions; and private law. Reading will be drawn from case law, policy, legal, socio-legal and interdisciplinary literature and consists of 13 seminars and 4 tutorials which will run over MT, HT and the first third of TT. There are no pre-requisites for the course.

The convenor for the course is Dr Liz Fisher and the course is taught by a small group of Faculty members.

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