Modern energy and natural resource development has always been, at heart, a global enterprise. Energy companies and developers, by necessity, frequently work in far-flung locations scattered among nations with vastly different legal systems and environmental regulatory systems. If one of their...

The crime of ‘ecocide’ has been discussed for almost 50 years and is of increasing relevance. Starting as scientific and biological debates during the Vietnam War, ecocide arguments became foremost political and then juridical. Recently in 2021, the ‘Stop Ecocide Foundation’ proposed to...

Since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, ecological pressures on our planet have grown more acute. Yet, modern environmental law has also continued to evolve and spread within international as well as among national legal systems. With the paths of international and national...

This is an introduction to the special issue on environmental laws and sustainability of the on-line peer review journal, Sustainability. In this introduction, we attempt to synthesize key lessons from the issue’s ten substantive articles. These lessons involve the use of law to achieve...

This article explains the basic elements of climate change law, with a particular focus on those issues that promise to be important for a considerable time as well as the major factors that are driving the development of this law. The emerging law of climate change is being constructed at the...

A principle that prohibits States from weakening their domestic levels of environmental protection continues to emerge at varying speeds within international trade, investment and environmental law. We explore the principle’s diverse history, rationale and legal expression in each of these...

Since 1985, the eight Great Lakes states and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec have cooperated to prevent almost all diversions of water from the Great Lakes basin. In 2005, the eight states signed an Agreement to create a tiered system of reviews for diversions and a draft interstate...

As the implications of anthropogenic climate change are better understood the pressure builds for more effective legal and policy responses at national and international levels. With climate change looming as an existential threat, climate change law ought not to be characterised merely as a...