LLM Global Environmental Law & Governance

This class will introduce you to the foundations of public international law, including its subjects, sources, principles and measures of implementation. It will address how this body of law has evolved over time to address the needs of environmental protection in transboundary and global settings.  

It will also provide you with a basic understanding of how compliance and dispute settlement operate in international environmental law, with special focus on the environmental case law of the International Court of Justice. 

This module appraises the operation of environmental law from a ‘global’ perspective.  

Accordingly, seminars will assess the interactions and mutual influences between international, regional, national and sub-national legal processes (including the customary laws of indigenous peoples and local communities, and law-making by other non-state actors). This module also lends itself to explore and discuss critically theories, methods, and challenges of comparative environmental law in a genuinely global perspective. In so doing, it attempts to contribute toward decolonising the curriculum of environmental law teaching, emphasising current and historical injustice at the root of environmental conflicts throughout the world. 

In the past half-century, the scope of international law has increased dramatically. From a tool dedicated to the regulation of formal diplomacy, international law has expanded to deal with the most varied kinds of international activity, from trade to environmental protection, and from human rights to scientific and technological cooperation. Most of this expansion has taken place through international treaties and institutions. International environmental treaties provide a case in point, both in terms of their relationship with other fields of international law (e.g., international trade law) and in terms of the relationship between its constituent parts (i.e. the various geographically and functionally limited regimes that make up its corpus).  

This module will provide an overview of global and regional environmental treaty regimes. It will explore the causes, manifestations, and implications of this deficit, and the ways in which policy coherence, mutual supportiveness, and synergies in implementation can be promoted. 

This module will engage with the notions and agendas of the Blue Economy. It will assess how international and comparative legal processes can contribute to sustainability. 

This module will explore the evolving nature and distinctive components of the international legal framework on climate change.

This module will explore the main legal regimes related the oceans and seas, with an in-depth focus on recent developments in marine governance in the context of sustainable development. 

This module will provide an overview of regional and sectoral fisheries regimes. In so doing, it will also allow students to engage critically with the contribution of this area of international and comparative law to competing visions of sustainability.