Project Events

[IS]LAND Grabbing, Community Standing and Access to Justice

Short Film Screening and Dialogue

Thursday 9 May 2024, 2:00-4:00pm

L143, UCD Sutherland School of Law + Zoom

 

It is our great pleasure to invite you to attend this event on (Is)land grabbing, community standing and access to justice, specifically the experience of Barbuda. This event is being hosted by the Environmental Law and Justice Research Group at UCD Sutherland School of Law and the ERC project Property [In]Justice. It will take place on Thursday, 9 May 2024, at 2.00p.m in the William Fry Theatre (L143) at the Sutherland School of Law, and online via Zoom.

To register to attend this event please follow this Eventbrite link and enter your details, specifying whether you plan to attend in person or online: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/island-grabbing-community-standing-and-access-to-justice-tickets-884932174957?aff=oddtdtcreator. 

On 27th February 2024, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled in John Mussington and another (Appellants) v Development Control Authority and 2 others (Respondents) (Antigua and Barbuda) that the parties did have standing to challenge a private jet airport funded by developers to serve luxury tourist enclaves.

The Privy Council’s ruling has set a new legal precedent for local communities across Commonwealth jurisdictions where projects affect critically endangered ecosystems and local livelihoods, and is the first legal case to cite the Escazú Agreement, the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, which entered into force in 2021. 

Join us for a dialogue with the appellants John Mussington and Jacklyn Frank, along with the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) about the implications for communities, their way of life and environmental justice.

 

Complicating Rights of Nature

Thursday, 25 May 2023 - 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

Harty Boardroom, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin

PROGRAMME and Registration

Amanda Byer and Alessandra Accogli are organising a one-day workshop titled ‘Complicating Rights of Nature’. Convening a wide range of scholars, the event intends to critically discuss the concept of Rights of Nature (RoN) in international law and its achievements, while exploring strategies for expanding its paradigm to include diverse and sustainable ideas about nature.

The event will be opened by a video presentation by Keynote Speaker Mr Thomas Linzey (Senior Legal Counsel, Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, USA).

Invited guest speakers include:

  • Dr Daphina Misiedjan, Assistant Professor in Human Rights and the Environment, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
  • Dr Oluwabusayo Wuraola, Lecturer in Law at Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom
  • Dr Peter Doran, Senior Lecturer, Queen’s University Belfast and founder of Environmental Justice Network Ireland, Northern Ireland
  • Dr Devin Beaulieu, Anthropologist, co-founder and Director of the Instituto de Estudios Jurídicos Indígenas y Originarios in Sucre, Bolivia
  • Dr Bróna MacNeil, PhD researcher, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland
  • Mr Julian Suarez, PhD candidate, University College Cork, Ireland
  • Mrs Niamh Guiry, PhD candidate, University College Cork, Ireland

The event will take place on Thursday, 25 May 2023 and it will be hosted by UCD Sutherland School of Law with generous financial support of the Earth Institute, the Environmental Regulation Research Group and the Property [In]Justice Project.

Due to limited number of places available, if you are interested in attending the event, please register below or contact the organisers at amanda.byer@ucd.ie and alessandra.accogli@ucdconnect.ie.

Landscape, Law, and Spatial Justice Symposium

12-13 May 2022

Museum of Literature, Ireland (MoLI), UCD Newman House, St. Stephen's Green

Download programme

Landscape is a central subject of inquiry in multiple disciplines including geography, planning, architecture, ecology, archaeology, and visual arts, yet the discipline with arguably the most influence on landscape – law – is largely absent from landscape scholarship. Law conceptualizes land primarily as property, and the interpretation of property rights in land emphasizes abstract qualities of ownership and alienability. This is at odds with the lived-in understandings of land that predated property when land was originally characterized by a symbiotic relationship between people and place, or landscape (Olwig 1996).

Landscape has been disengaging from its overtly aesthetic associations in recent decades to reclaim some of its legal identity, in the sense of place-oriented rights and duties and themes of social justice and sustainability. The relationship between law and landscape is far-reaching, touching on human rights, environmental protection, cultural heritage law, property law, and spatial justice. Landscape norms now include not only protection measures, but also an acknowledgement of the rights of communities to participate in the decisions affecting their landscapes (Strecker 2018).

Our overarching goal is to build on this momentum by exploring, confronting, and expanding the link between landscape and law in the pursuit of spatial justice. The symposium will explore this relationship via abstract versus lived-in rights to landscape, the question of who has rights, and how we might recover elements of substantive landscape in law by reimagining and reconfiguring property. Landscape is increasingly being employed (including beyond Europe) as an umbrella term for collective action. How are contestations over landscape articulated in reference to legal norms, and what other forms of discourse are they situated in locally, nationally, or transnationally?

Submission process

We are inviting proposals for papers exploring the linkages between landscape, law, and spatial justice (interdisciplinary approaches welcome). Cross-cutting themes include the ongoing legacies of colonialism via land governance today, as well as the need to confront and interrogate (property) law’s role as a tool of empire AND potential as a vehicle for progressive change.

Relevant themes include, but are not limited to:

  1. Landscape and spatially (un)just consequences/legacies of law.
  2. The limits and possibilities of landscape for contesting land acquisition, or securing use and access rights.
  3. Landscape communities, collective rights, and legal standing.
  4. The use of landscape as a term for collective action beyond Europe.
  5. Decolonizing property rights, progressive property, and landscape futures.

To submit a paper proposal, please send a 400-word (max) abstract, biographical details of no more than 300 words, and contact information to landlawandjustice@ucd.ie by 31 January 2022. Please state whether you intend to present in person OR online. NOTE, our preference is for in person presentations. However, for proposals coming from further afield and beyond Europe, online participation will also be possible.

Deadlines

  • Proposal Submission: 31 January 2021
  • Confirmation of Acceptance: 14 February 2022
  • Draft Paper Submission: 14 April 2022
  • Symposium: 12-13 May 2022

This symposium is organized within the framework of a transnational research project PROPERTY [IN]JUSTICE   www.landlawandjustice.eu funded by the European Research Council (ERC), led by Amy Strecker, and hosted by the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin. In going beyond traditional legal analysis to include interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives, the project aims to push the boundaries of property and advocate for more place-based understandings of land across international law.