Thank you for all your support for and participation in our ongoing work to mainstream climate change in legal education in 2024!
2024 has been a huge year: we published the first tranche of Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Climate Change and the Australian Legal System; we launched our ‘Climate Conscious Lawyers’ website; held a workshop ‘Climate Change and Legal Education: the Why, the How, and the Priestley’ at Sydney Law School, gave numerous talks and seminars and much more!
Some quick announcements….
Justice Brian Preston, Chief Judge of the NSW Land & Environment Court, has very kindly permitted us to upload the video recording of his excellent opening address on ‘Mainstreaming Climate Change in Legal Education’ at the ‘Climate Change and Legal Education: the Why, the How, and the Priestley’ workshop held at Sydney Law School to the Climate Conscious Lawyers website. Thank you, Your Honour, for your enduring and deep commitment to mainstreaming climate change throughout the Law curriculum, and for your concrete support and inspiration with this helpful resource for legal educators.
The next tranche of chapters in the open-access online book Becoming A Climate Conscious Lawyer will be published in the week of 19 February 2025. The second tranche of (seven) chapters to be published in February are:
- Legal Professional Responsibilities (Ethics) (Vivien Holmes, ANU, and Julian Webb, UMelb)
- Tort Law (Joanna Kyriakakis, Monash)
- Civil Procedure (Asha Keaney, EDO)
- International Law (Tim Stephens, USyd)
- Legal Theory (Margaret Davies, Flinders, and Kathleen Birrell, La Trobe)
- Consumer Law (Christine Parker, UMelb, and Hope Johnson, QUT)
- Public Interest Litigation (Justice Brian Preston, NSW Land & Environment Court).
The first three chapters already published mid-2024 are:
- Introduction (which explains and contextualises climate change in relation to law) (Julia Dehm, La Trobe, Nicole Graham, USydney, and Zoe Nay, UMelb)
- Criminal Law and Procedure (Steven Tudor, La Trobe, and Nicole Rogers, Bond)
- Administrative Law (Anna Huggins, QUT, and Ellen Hawkins, QUT).
We also recently published a case study reflecting on the process of creating this open access resource: “Catalysing Climate Conscious Legal Education Through Open Education Resources” (by Julia Dehm, Zoe Nay, Nicole Graham and Steven Chang) in Open Education Down UndOER: Australasian Case Studies edited by Ash Barber et al, published by Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) via the CAUL Open Educational Resources Collective.
Plans for 2025….
We have a number of exciting plans for 2025 including developing Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer – Educators’ Companion, collecting syllabi for mainstreaming climate in legal education core curricula as well as climate electives taught in Australia and abroad and another conference. Stay tuned for more!
In the meantime, we wish you all the best for the holiday period and a good start to the new year.