Environmental Rights & Responsibilities (LAWS20009)

The climate emergency and the protection of the environment is one of the defining issues of our time. It spans domestic and international spheres and raises important issues of justice and fairness. It raises pressing legal questions. There are multiple legal systems that regulate and influence how we relate to the environment, including constitutional and administrative law, property and private law, international environmental law, human rights law and even international investment law.

This subject offers an introduction to how law shapes and defines our relations to the environment, including issues of sustainability, democracy, environmental justice and global inequality. It brings together a number of areas of law, and invites students to consider legal principles, institutions and legal questions at the heart of environmental rights and responsibilities. The subject will draw on case studies in Australian, comparative and international law. It will invite students to explore the possibilities and limits of different areas of law in realising social and environmental objectives, the way that those areas of law are already implicated in environmental problems, and to consider how law may protect environmental rights and environmental justice in novel ways.

Indicative principal topics include:

• the emergence of the ‘environment’ in law and how this influences environmental conflicts;
• the way that various actors use law to ‘frame’ interests in the environment and the role of political and legal mobilisation against governments and corporations;
• the relationship between democracy, environmental problems, and the climate crisis;
• the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) and legal mobilisation in Australia;
• the law of civil disobedience, direct action and disruptive protest;
• how law frames struggles between corporate actors and social movements over interests in the environment;
• ‘sustainable development’ and the climate crisis;
• international legal frameworks emerging in response to the climate crisis;
• rights of nature movements and legal pluralism; and
• Indigenous law, sovereignty, colonialism and land.