Law plays a vital role in the life and loss of open shared spaces, used and enjoyed on an everyday basis by local people. In this article, we adopt an analytical framework based on an ethic of care to critique the registration of land as a ‘town or village green’, using the example of an inquiry into the greens status of an ancient woodland. Analysing written and oral witness statements in this inquiry makes clear the centrality of such places in many people’s lives, giving rise to community-based, and forward-looking, interests. However, the legal focus upon quantitative assessments of individuals’ use of land in the recent past means that the prospective consequences of losing such valued areas are currently poorly acknowledged, and accounted for, in the registration process. This leads to the question whether an ethic of care towards everyday shared spaces may be better recognised via more deliberative plan-making regimes.
Law plays a vital role in the life and loss of open, green spaces used, shared, and enjoyed on an everyday basis by local people. In this article, we adopt an analytical framework based on environmental justice to critique the registration process for this type of land as a town or village green. We focus on the considerable challenges facing people seeking to protect areas in this way, using as an example a public inquiry into the registration as a green of ancient woodland on the outskirts of Sheffield, England. Analysing written and oral witness statements, we express concerns about imbalance in access to legal and other resources as between prospective developers and residents and wildlife groups opposing development. Inspired by feminist theorists and critical geographers, we consider the influence of an ethic of care on conceptions of justice. This methodological and theoretical approach helps us to understand how such local spaces occupy a central place in many people’s everyday lives and how the consequences of the loss of these areas might be better recognised and accounted for in legal processes, with greater sensitivity and a stronger sense of dignity and fairness than is currently the case.
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The campaign for universities to divest from investments involving fossil fuels is gathering strength and has clocked up some notable ‘wins’. It is gaining support from similar campaigns taking place in a diverse range of financial, political and religious organisations (for example, the Guardian Media Group, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, the World Bank, IKEA, the United Nations). In universities, the campaign is drawing together student activists, academics, support staff and alumni (some of whom have returned their degrees in protest at universities refusing to divest from fossil fuels or prevaricating on the decision). The headlines of the divestment campaign may be grouped along ethical, moral, fiscal, psychological and socio-political lines. As a teacher of environmental law, I suggest that the pedagogical dimension of fossil fuel divestment is highly significant and potentially provides a unifying theme in the thinking and debate about divestment as well as providing a firm foundation for forging staff–student alliances. In terms of the relevance for legal education, the divestment campaign offers an opportunity for links to be formed between broad social and environmental justice movements and environmental education reforms (as highlighted by a recent case brought by students against Harvard University for its failure to divest from fossil fuels). In this article, I suggest that key aspects of the divestment campaign encourage thinking about the role of universities in combating climate change, with a focus on teaching and learning.
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The International Journal of Law in Context is the companion journal to the 'Law in Context' book series.It provides a forum for interdisciplinary legal studies and offers intellectual space for ground-breaking critical research.It is not committed to any particular theory, ideology or methodology and invites papers from a variety of standpoints, ideologies, perspectives, and methods.It publishes contextual work about law and its relationship with other disciplines including but not limited to science, literature, humanities, philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethics, history and geography.The journal aims to explore and expand the boundaries of law and legal studies.
This article explores the shaping and possibly reforming potential of ideas about sustainability in legal education by drawing up a scale of environmental education theories, arranged according to their propensity to transform radically university education. The article offers a critical analysis of current individualist strategies aimed at developing students' environmental skills, in particular that these hamper opportunities for universities to develop a broader and more creative agenda of social change. Applying ideas about how environmental education communities of practice develop, this article identifies some pockets of activity seeking to integrate ideas of sustainability into the law curriculum, including via environmental law and teaching Wild Law or Earth Jurisprudence. These issues form part of an on‐going debate about how well law students are being prepared for work in highly challenging social, environmental, and financial circumstances, against the backdrop of a broader question about ‘what are universities for?’
This chapter explores the interaction between solidarity, territorial cohesion and environmental justice within the EU. It considers how the spatial focus at the heart of territorial cohesion can be combined to form an idea of solidarity between people and places within the territory of the EU. Taken together, environmental justice, territorial cohesion and spatial solidarity embrace a common core: they all suggest that location should not be a disadvantage. Relying on the still inchoate and contested concept of territorial cohesion, policy makers and can use cohesion funding, treaty provisions and legal prescriptions to pursue environmental justice in situ, creating positively ‘just environments’ from the ground up for both people and places within the EU.
Despite being steeped in the language of sustainable development, current conceptions of territorial cohesion are broadly silent on the practice of environmental protection. This paper criticizes this omission, suggesting that environmental cohesion is an integral part of territorial cohesion, reflecting territorial cohesion’s concern with balance and co-ordination while drawing on the objectives of the environmental justice movement. We suggest that while environmental cohesion is not currently scheduled for addition to the three cohesion pillars, the importance of achieving environmental balance and equity can be characterised as part of territorial cohesion’s inchoate claim. Framing environmental cohesion as a concern throughout the territory of the EU, by placing it squarely within the remit of principles of territorial cohesion and solidarity, empowers individuals and communities as well as places. If through funding or delineation these spatial units are conceptualized as EU places then examples of best practice in one part of the region provides political and philosophical leverage to argue that standards should be the same throughout. The very idea of EU places is underpinned by understandings of cohesion and solidarity extending throughout the territory of the EU. Environmental cohesion can provide a means of comparing and improving environmental conditions between places.
This chapter addresses the various meanings of territorial cohesion. Section 2 tracks the various paths which have led to the ascendancy of territorial cohesion in EU law and policy. Section 3 discusses the nature of its linkage with the concept of solidarity using four policy directions seemingly being pursued (sometimes simultaneously) by those advancing territorial cohesion as a byword for European spatial planning, but also more broadly as an important aim of the EU: (i) cohesion/competitiveness; (ii) solidarity/diversity; (iii) spatializing the European social model; and (iv) sustainable development. It is argued that, as currently conceived in EU policy, the linking of territorial cohesion and solidarity — the joining of social and spatial protection — is capable of masking the ‘bads’ (ecological degradation, loss of community and a sense of place) by a focus on the ‘goods’, as conceived by the EU (prosperity, regional development, global competitiveness).
Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society - Edited byFranz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Anne Griffiths, Farnham, Ashgate, 2009. 225pp. incl index.ISBN978-0-7546-7291-3£65.00 hardback - Volume 6 Issue 3
This special issue explores the idea of commons, placing it in a theoretical but also richly empirical context. In this introductory article, we highlight the depth and diversity of the scholarship on commons represented in this issue. Drawing from the articles that follow, we examine a range of commons that share a dependency upon the collective and local ownership of land, resources or ideas, held in an often communal manner and sometimes in opposition to private property. We begin by returning to land as the original locus of commons and trace the importance of issues of public space and public access. In moving beyond a land-based and unitary conception of commons, we analyse the emergence of richer understandings of commons, divorced from physical or geographical entities — cultural and historical commons, and environmental commons including the idea of a `Global Commons'. In these different settings, we consider how the idea of `the commons' can work as a signifier — of resistance, community, collective action and common values.
‘Sustainable development’ has been an enormously influential concept in environmental law since at least the early 1980s. The World Commission on Environment and Development published the seminal work on sustainable development, Our Common Future (more commonly known as the ‘Brundtland Report’, after its chair) in 1987. The Brundtland Report has been built on at an international level, most prominently by the United Nations Convention on Environment and Development (the famous Rio Earth Conference) in 1992, and more recently by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Sustainable development is now extraordinarily widely accepted and supported across the world. We begin this chapter by discussing the evolution of sustainable development through international law. The most widely quoted ‘definition’ of sustainable development comes from the Brundtland Report, according to which sustainable development is development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (pp. 8 and 43). The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development provides an alternative in its reference to ‘the interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars of sustainable development – economic development, social development and environmental protection’ (para. 5), although this three-pillared approach is an evolution of earlier approaches, rather than a break with the past.
