Law Culture Environment

Just over half is texts of laws and administrative policies. Also included are 6 extensive case studies.

Following decades of vigorous economic expansion, Asia is confronting the environmental consequences of unfettered development. This poses a challenge because of the strong bias of prevailing cultural systems in the region toward the goal of lifting standards of living over achieving ecological sustainability. This book juxtaposes international environmental norms and practices with relevant Asian policies and their applications in key areas. Roda Mushkat examines the fundamental principle of public participation in environmental law-making, as well as the "rights approach," against the emergence of democratic and human rights norms in the region. The complex relationship between trade and the environment is also discussed in light of the strong regional emphasis on economic growth, trade liberalization, and the aversion to conditionalities. Given regionalization processes in Asia-Pacific and elsewhere, this work seeks to establish to what extent such processes have led to the regionalization of international environmental law. International Environmental Law and Asian Values concludes that, although some gaps can be identified between international imperatives and regional responses, "Asian values" have not proved to be an insurmountable barrier to the spread of international environmental legal ideas. On the whole, the region is responding to impulses emanating from the global arena rather than resisting them consciously. The analysis and conclusions of this comprehensive and original work will be of considerable interest to scholars of international law and relations, environmental policy, comparative culture, economic development, and social change.

Over the last century, international law has sought to keep pace with sweeping changes that have revolutionised the international community. It has done so in various ways: by developing new fields, adopting new legal instruments, and including new actors and entities in the international fora. Human rights law and environmental law have emerged to address essential issues raised by civil society. Treaties, judgments and soft law instruments have attempted to fill the gaps in regulation. International organisations, corporations, civil society organisations and individuals have all worked to make and enforce, also by judicial means, legal rules. But is all this sufficient?In an effort to answer this question, the chapters of this volume explore selected emerging issues in the fields of human rights, the environment, cultural heritage and law of the sea. Can state responsibility help to protect the environment? Can protecting human rights be reconciled with national security? Can the UN Security Council address climate change? Is law of the sea still fit for purpose? And how can we balance human rights and the environment, or cultural heritage and law of the sea? The international scholars and experienced practitioners who have contributed to this volume discuss these and other key questions.Given its scope, the book will appeal to researchers and scholars of international law, as well as those specialising in human rights law, environmental law, cultural heritage law, and law of the sea.

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.

In ten essays, anthropologists (mostly) focus more on the practical rather than cultural and ideological issues of postcolonial legacies in land law, contemporary claims on ancestral lands, and conservation issues--from Australia to West Africa. Abramson is with U. College London. Theodossopoulos is at the U. of Wales-Lampeter. The book is distributed by Stylus. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

This book is the first interdisciplinary study of the rule of law in an environment of complementary culture. It argues that the rule of law should not be defined solely through the development of institutions, but also through the mobilization of existing culture towards support for law and its enforcement. Recognizing that the rule of law is most often misunderstood by many, the book describes the benefits of the rule of law and exposes its weaknesses and limitations. It summarizes the history and practice through case studies where culture has played an essential role in achieving a sustainable rule of law in practice. It incorporates the unique challenges to rule of law in regions like the Middle East, and addresses the nexus of law culture and institutions in the context of policing in the United States. Appropriate for researchers, professionals, and practitioners of law, policing, cultural criminology, and sociology, this book identifies practical and actionable elements of culture that can be mobilized, even in states that are only in the initial stages of developing the rule of law.

Discusses how culture both facilitates and inhibits our ability to address, live with, and make sense of climate change.

A comprehensive reference for the growing field of environmental law, this important legal primer defines and interprets the statues and federal policies that protect archeological resources in land and water environments.