People living in poverty or who are marginalised are disproportionately impacted by climate change and have complex and intertwined civil law problems. Yet, little is known about how climate change modifies or exacerbates their legal issues, and how it complicates legal service delivery across the access to justice sector. Drawing on the perspectives of Australian lawyers, in this article I report on the findings of my qualitative mixed methods study about the nexus between climate change, civil legal need and access to justice. Data was obtained through a survey (n=49) and interviews with lawyers (n=16) from several Australian states and legal assistance services. Lawyers who participated in the study perceived climate change to be significantly affecting civil legal problems. This was supported by several observations, including: the increasing complexity of legal need; greater entanglement of legal, social and emotional issues; barriers to delivering legal services in disasters and in working with disaster-impacted communities; and laws and legal processes being unfit for purpose in a changing climate. Lawyers identified mould and extreme heat as specific climate impacts that decrease housing habitability and contribute to tenancy, neighbourhood and employment law problems, among others. Adopting a Capabilities Approach framework to evaluate study findings, I conclude that access to justice policy should view climate change as a driver of injustice and legal need.
While beer has long been the subject of historical, cultural, commercial, and technical writing, its legal dimensions had never been comprehensively examined in a single volume. Beer Law is the world’s first scholarly book devoted to beer and the laws that regulate it. It offers a remarkably broad and detailed account of the rules, disputes, and regulatory questions that have shaped, and continue to shape, the production, sale, and consumption of beer around the world.
It is indeed an honour to deliver the 2026 George Winterton Memorial Lecture, which commemorates a great Australian constitutional scholar. My theme is the unique and, in that sense, experimental nature of New Zealand’s constitutional settlement. Having read some of Professor Winterton’s writing, I understand him to have dedicated his career to the distinctive, and also experimental, nature of Australia’s federal constitutional settlement.
PS Atiyah: An Academic Autobiography is an unusual book. Autobiographical writing by academics is rare, if only because academic lives are seldom of interest to anyone except, perhaps, the author’s family and other scholars. It appears that Atiyah wrote his autobiography soon after he retired in 1988. Its story ends in 1991. He offered the manuscript to several ‘commercial’ publishers, but without success. It was eventually published by a university press at the instigation of academic colleagues and admirers. Atiyah had deposited a copy with the British Academy, ostensibly to provide material for the biographical memoir with which Fellows are honoured. That memoir was written by James Goudkamp, who also edited this volume and provides a preface.
Ramona Vijeyarasa’s book, Rewriting the Rules: Gender-Responsive Lawmaking for the Twenty-First Century, is a broad-ranging international survey of laws with particular ramifications for gender. Topics covered include familiar issues of concern to feminist scholars, such as gender-based violence, parental leave, and corporate quotas, as well as issues that are less familiar, including modern slavery, small-scale mining, gender-responsive budgeting and artificial intelligence.
