This is a public lecture by Professor Natasha Affolder, University of British Columbia on, 'Contagious Environmental Lawmaking'.

The quest to explain the diffusion of ideas, policies, and institutions occupies a critical place in current thought. Why do some ideas, concepts, and social movements go viral and others fail to spread? The tendency to think about law through the lens of its transferability is equally a marker of contemporary environmental law practice. Indeed, it is rare to find an environmental law ‘innovation’, whether it be a form of climate lawsuit, a specialist environmental court, or an example of the legal recognition of rights of nature, announced without some discussion of its transferability.

This lecture explores the practices of spreading law and legal ideas to tackle environmental crises and advance sustainability. It argues that both the language and the methods that we use to ‘find’ and ‘map’ law’s spread produce depeopled accounts of transnational lawmaking. Identifying transnational law’s ‘missing people’ thus becomes an unavoidable part of explaining how legal ideas move, and why this movement matters. The concept of contagious lawmaking offers an opportunity to consider the value, and also the hidden costs, of packaging and producing law with replication in mind.

 

Biography

Natasha Affolder is a Professor at the Allard Law School, University of British Columbia. Her research explores ways in which law and legal scholarship can more significantly, and more thoughtfully, be part of global conversations on sustainability.

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This event is open to the public and everybody is welcome to attend, though everyone must register.

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