First Nations Peoples, Climate Change, Human Rights and Legal Rights

This article provides a First Nations standpoint on climate change, informed by human rights law and legal education. It is co-authored by a Yuin woman who is a law academic, a Wirdi man who is a Queens Counsel, and a human rights law academic. The article argues that for any responses to climate change to be effective, they must be grounded in the perspectives, knowledge, and rights of First Nations peoples. The utility of human rights instruments to protect First Nation interests in a climate change milieu is explored at the international and domestic levels. Concomitantly, structural change must begin with the Indigenisation of legal education and the embedding of legal responses to climate change into the law curriculum. A holistic approach is necessary.

Climate Crisis, Legal Education and Law Student Well-Being

This article addresses the impact of the climate crisis on the mental health of young people in the context of legal education. It reviews the evidence on youth mental health regarding the climate crisis and applies it to what is already known about law student well-being. Drawing on theories of learning design, the article considers a range of pedagogical strategies that law schools can use to engage students who are committed to action on climate change through law. A case study, the Climate Justice Initiative at The University of Queensland School of Law, is presented as one example of what is possible. This article emphasises the significance of a partnership approach to student engagement and contends that this may yield benefits especially in the context of climate change-related legal work. Despite the negative psychological impact of the climate crisis on law students, it concludes that there are practical activities that law schools can and should initiate to support student well-being.

Why We Did This, What's Included, and What We Missed

It is customary in an introduction for guest editors to explain the theme of the special issue and introduce the authors. While we intend to do both of these things, we also want to explain why we chose to undertake this project and address and acknowledge some omissions.

The Obligation of Law Schools to Teach Climate Change Law

Climate change will impact most, if not all, aspects of law and regulation. Law is a key mechanism of social governance, and it has a key role to play in regulating and addressing the causes and consequences of climate change. In the midst of the unfolding climate crisis law schools have a clear and pressing obligation to contribute to efforts to address climate change and its consequences by ensuring climate change law occupies an appropriate place in the law curriculum. In this article we consider the obligation of universities, and law schools in particular, to respond appropriately to the climate crisis in their program offerings. We begin by reflecting on the obligation of law schools and universities to contribute to the public good, an obligation often downplayed given the contemporary emphasis upon the ‘job-readiness’ of graduates and other neoliberal priorities. We then focus on the obligation of universities and law schools to respond appropriately to climate change. We examine the landscape of climate change law and identify the essential elements of climate change law for inclusion in the law curriculum. And we conclude by identifying examples of ways in which law schools are already incorporating climate change law into their law programs.

Climate Change and Law

Climate change is a global problem. This characterisation has major consequences for international law, domestic law and legal education. Drawing on legal developments, scholarship and pedagogy, this article has three main claims. First, it argues that lawyers dealing with climate change require proficiency across different areas of law, not just the law that seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Secondly, to better understand how these areas of law fit together, and how they should fit together, the article points to relevant theories, including ideas relating to fragmentation and regime interaction within international law. Thirdly, the article examines ways in which legal education can encourage ethical and moral evaluations as well as strategic awareness, especially to ensure that legal action to address climate change does not perpetuate inequalities and injustice within the community of states. Legal education and law have important roles in mitigating climate change and in fostering a sensibility that recognises the unequal burdens between and within countries. In training the arbiters of global destiny, today’s law schools must continue to critique the law’s relationship with modern production and consumption patterns.

Tort Law and Climate Change

Tort law presents doctrinal barriers to plaintiffs seeking remedies for climate change harms in common law jurisdictions. However, litigants are likely to persist in pursuing tortious causes of action in the absence of persuasive policy and regulatory alternatives. Ongoing litigation in Smith v Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd in New Zealand and Sharma v Minister for Environment in Australia highlights tensions between torts doctrine and climate change litigation in both countries. Regardless of its ultimate outcome, that litigation provides a valuable opportunity to integrate theoretical questions about the legitimacy of judicial lawmaking, and intersectional critical legal perspectives, into the teaching of torts.

Teaching Private Law in a Climate Crisis

First Nations analyses, climate science, social science and legal research indicate the significant role of private law in facilitating the conditions of climate change. Private law is a contingent feature of planetary health because its key concepts and institutions concentrate the legal rights to capital — the goods of life — in the private sphere. Private entitlements can act as shields against collective interests. Reforming law to address the climate crisis involves greater regulation of private interests to pursue the global goal of sustaining organised human societies, and thus addressing conflict between individual freedoms and collective exigencies. Reform depends on a differently educated generation of legal thinkers and practitioners.

Authority to Decide

To realise that there is no Court in Australia with unlimited jurisdiction is at one stroke to recognise the continuing importance of Justice Leeming’s standard work, and the relevance of this second edition. The ‘autochthonous expedient’, as Sir Owen Dixon named it, has much to answer for: it leads inexorably to a bifurcated system of state and federal courts, which has many toils and snares for the unwary. To compound the problem, the state courts enjoy a large amount of ‘invested’ federal jurisdiction, which means that on many occasions they exercise it without appreciating the fact that they have done so.

The Right to Liberty in a Pandemic

The European Convention on Human Rights has given rise to the most extensive and influential case law of any human rights jurisdiction, and the inclusion of an express infectious diseases exception to the right to liberty suggests that its jurisprudence is likely to provide the best available guidance to states on the circumstances in which such measures may be justifiable and lawful. However, this article argues that the principles developed to date are limited in their applicability to the current crisis, and are insufficient for determining the appropriate balance between public health and the right to liberty when seeking to control the spread of a large-scale, highly infectious disease.

Examining the Criminal Regime in Chapter 7 of the Corporations Act 2001

The criminal regime in Chapter 7 of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) contains 299 separate offences and is extremely complex. This paper undertakes the first detailed examination of the criminal regime in Chapter 7 in anticipation of an increase in criminal prosecutions of financial services misconduct following the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Superannuation, Banking and Financial Services Industry. The review uncovers a number of drafting anomalies and inconsistencies in the criminal regime. In light of these issues, the paper advocates simplification of the criminal regime and puts forward reform proposals aimed at fostering compliance and observance of the law.