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Spring (Hilary) term 2010 series

The Smith School and Oxford Law co hosted the Environment Law Discussion Group seminar series.  A forum for students and the wider audience to listen to presentations and debate important issues in the area of environmental law and policy.

Convenor Eloise Scotford writes:

“The end of Hilary term saw the end of the Environmental Law Discussion Group seminar series – although we may sneak in another session next term.  It has been a great term for discussing environmental law issues over lunch in the welcoming Smith School seminar room, amongst both with lawyers and non-lawyers.  Our final session concerning the topic ‘ What Do Environmental Lawyers Do?’ provoked some spirited discussion, especially concerning the challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship around environmental problems.  We discussed and debated the relatively unpopular but critical issue of the methodology of interdisciplinary scholarship, and how joint research projects can be frustrating exercises when methodological problems are not confronted at the outset.  We see this as very much the start, or part, of an ongoing discussion that is at the heart of the Smith’s Schools research mission.  The slides for this final seminar are posted here on the Smith School website, for those who missed it or otherwise for further consideration, and we welcome any comments about related problems encountered by others in undertaking interdisciplinary research.  Other methodological difficulties that environmental law scholars face in their research include the speed and scale of legal change (often in response to urgent environmental problems and developing scientific knowledge), the multijurisdictional nature of environmental regulatory regimes, and the challenge of understanding regimes of environmental governance that extend beyond traditional legal rules and Court decisions to involve novel legal and non-legal ways of ordering and complex institutional structures and cultures, inviting a sociological appreciation of how law operates in society.  All these challenges were discussed in our final seminar, and from the audience discussion, some of these research challenges resonate in other disciplines.  What did resonate, in particular, was the theme in environmental law scholarship that the subject is yet to mature or grow up, because it occupies relatively novel scholarly territory.

 Many interesting and difficult questions arose out of this term’s ELDG seminars, some of which I leave here for further thought.  We welcome continuing online discussion on any of these issues – it often turns out one scholar’s research problem is not necessarily another scholar’s research solution, but at least another scholar’s problem too.

  • How might different disciplines share and organise their methodological research problems and parameters sufficiently in advance of a joint research project getting off the ground (including setting its timeframe and funding requirements)?
  • Who should bear the financial responsibility for cleaning up contaminated land sites? (there is a statutory regime in the UK that offers one answer to this question, but it is not always clear and is a relatively controversial way to apportion liability)
  • How does, or should, the European Union integrate environmental protection requirements into all its other policies (including the internal market, transport policy, competition policy, immigration and agriculture), as it is required to do under its founding Treaty (most recently revised by the Lisbon Treaty)?
  • What are the respective rights of neighbouring states with respect to transboundary watercourses (particularly where the activities in one state affect water availability or quality downstream in the neighbouring state)?
  • Finally, for a bit of fun as much as scholarly enquiry, what is your experience of environmental lawyers, if any?  Good?  Bad?  Necessary?  Unnecessary?  Indifferent?’

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