Full Description
This book provides a practical, functional comparison among various institutions, tools, implementation practices and norms in environmental law across legal cultures.
This is a new approach that focuses on the act of comparison, looking at legal practice, from the ground up, including the perspective of citizens. Most literature on comparative environmental law either focuses on a two-way comparison of state jurisdictions or simply juxtaposes environmental features of two or more state jurisdictions without engaging in any analysis of the comparison. However, this book treats legal cultures as the objects of comparison as it provides practical comparisons among various institutions, tools and norms in environmental law. The arrangement and organisation of the material reverses the more traditional presentation of comparative environmental law as a series of countries within which separate descriptions are respectively presented. In this book the reader is presented with environmental legal themes, with examples and case studies drawn from various cultures that are compared in order to help understand the theme. Case studies draw on the authors' experiences in a range of legal cultures, including in Australia, Brazil, China, Chile, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Nigeria, Slovakia, and the USA. The comparative nature of the book allows domestic professionals to develop skills to enable them to understand and advocate broader contexts for clients, and helps students become more aware of specific legal systems while questioning why their own system functions (or does not function) as it does.
The book is aimed at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of environmental law as well as researchers and practitioners.
Contents
Part I Comparison 1. Why Compare? The Biological, Cognitive and Social Functions of Comparison for the Human 2. A Taxonomy of Comparison: The Accessus ad auctores Part II Institutions and Bodies of Environmental Legislation, Implementation and Dispute Resolution 3. Locating Environmental Law Functions Among Legislative, Judicial and Implementation Bodies 4. Resolution of Environmental Disputes Part III Norms and Tools of Environmental Legislation, Implementation and Dispute Resolution 5. Constitutional Provisions 6. The Interface Between Law and Politics Part IV Persons Subject to Environmental Law 7. Public Participation 8. Economic Choices Enabled by Environmental Law 9. Environmental Impact Assessment Systems 10. Environmental Crime and Enforcement 11. Conclusions Across Cultures
