CLP - Model Law?

Speaker: Professor Natasha Affolder (The University of British Columbia)

Chair: TBC

Understanding how environmental laws, and the ideas underlying those laws, spread, diffuse, or proliferate transnationally is a formidable task. This lecture investigates the global spread of environmental law through the frequently unacknowledged use of models, templates, and best practices. Drawing on a case study of the global diffusion of environmental assessment, this work harnesses the power of computer-assisted research techniques and textual similarity analysis to illuminate the spread of legal tools, terminologies, techniques and mindsets. In so doing, it disrupts the narratives of time, space, and authority that have dominated accounts of environmental law’s spread. Ultimately, this work suggests that the ‘quiet’ activities of lawyers and legal scholars may matter rather more than we are comfortable acknowledging.

Natasha Affolder is a Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. She is a leading scholar of transnational environmental law whose scholarship seeks to illuminate the unseen and under-examined dimensions of global law and its practice. Drawing on her background of legal practice and advisory work in both the public and private sectors, she currently leads a research project exploring the global diffusion of environmental and climate law and the resulting creation and circulation of law’s templates.

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. Sign up for the mailing list to receive emails about Current Legal Problems lectures

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