CLRM Keynote Lecture: A Methodology for Navigating Legalised Policy Goals: Environmental Legislation as a Case Study, Professor Eloise Scotford, Faculty of Laws, UCL

From a legal methodology perspective, legislation might be perceived as easy material for legal scholars. As lawyers, we are skilled in knowing how to read, interpret and construe legislation (and some of us might even know how to draft it). In this lecture, Professor Scotford will show how legislation is not always readily navigable or knowable for the legal researcher, and that there are important legal methodological choices to be considered and made in approaching this rich area of legal research.  She will analyse this methodological challenge in the context of environmental legislation, which has certain characteristics that heighten this methodological complexity - often rapid legislative change and frequent reform, the introduction of novel legal concepts, and the creation of legal and administrative frameworks for contentious areas of environmental policy.  The legalisation of environmental policy goals through statute raises particular challenges for legal research, which this lecture will explore by focusing on two particular examples of environmental legislation: climate legislation (in a global context) and the draft Environment (Principles and Governance) Bill 2018, which proposes a new (post EU exit) legal framework for environmental policy in England and UK reserved matters.