What Does it Mean to Know About Environmental Problems? Challenges for Public Law (and How to Respond)
15 April 2025 (Tuesday)
12pm – 1pm
Room 824, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
As the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing notes: ‘[c]ontinued life on earth depends on getting our knowledge into as good a shape as possible’. Given the physical and social complexity of environmental problems, that is not easy. It is also a matter that raises classic public law issues – albeit in ways that make them both novel and quintessential public law questions. In this lecture, by drawing on examples from across common law jurisdictions, I show how addressing those public law questions requires lawyers to foster their legal expertise so as to ‘imagine better’ when it comes to both environmental problems and public law.
Speaker:
Professor Liz Fisher is Professor of Environmental Law, Faculty of Law and Corpus Christi College University of Oxford. Her works explores how national public lawyers bolster their legal expertise by imagining better. She researches and writes about administrative law and environmental law in a range of different common law jurisdictions. Elizabeth Fisher and Sidney Shapiro, Administrative Competence: Reimagining Administrative Law (CUP 2020) was jointly awarded the American Bar Association Administrative Law Section’s Scholarship Award 2021. Her 2007 book, Risk Regulation and Administrative Constitutionalism, won the SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2008. Other publications include Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2017) and Fisher, Lange and Scotford, Environmental Law: Text, Cases and Materials (2nd ed, OUP 2019). Recent edited collections include Elizabeth Fisher, Jeff King, and Alison L Young (eds), The Foundations and Future of Public Law (OUP 2020) and Elizabeth Fisher and Brian Preston (eds) An Environmental Court in Action: Function, Doctrine and Process (Hart 2022). Fisher is also General Editor of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.
Prior registration is required for this in-person event: https://bit.ly/417OEhT