University of Western Australia Law Review

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Latest documents

• Disaster Risk Reduction, Vulnerability and the Law: A Case for Including Animals

  The 2009 Black Saturday Bushfires revealed animals' profound vulnerability to natural hazards. Since then, multiple Australian states have introduced planning instruments to improve outcomes for animals in disasters. While a welcome trend, these instruments primarily focus on the acute phases of emergency preparedness and response. However, the disaster management cycle is broader than this, commencing with prevention and mitigation. Recognising that action early in the cycle is crucial, international instruments emphasise pre-emptive disaster risk reduction measures. This article contends that animals' vulnerability to disasters, as affirmed in the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfires, necessitates measures targeted at reducing their disaster risk

• Rights of nature as a response to the Anthropocene
• Rights, reasons, and international norms

  This article focuses on access to environmental justice. In particular, the article focuses on the right to remedy and redress articulated in Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration 1992 and the effective transposition of the principle in domestic law by interrogating three recent decisions from the senior courts in England and Wales, Ireland, and New Zealand concerning the reasons given for environmental decisions. These decisions provide substantive justification for reasoned decision-making so that interested persons are given the human dignity of knowing what was decided and why, for viewing this question from the perspective of a person who did not participate in the proceedings, for avoiding judicial deference on appeal by requiring that original decisions should be objectively reasonable and based on sound evidence, and (as a matter of natural justice) focusing remedial discretion on quashing defective decisions

• Addressing carbon and climate change through environmental impact assessment: A case study of Western Australian LNG and the 'Burrup Hub' project

  Where specific climate change policy and legal frameworks are lacking, environmental impact assessment (EIA) processes are being relied upon to understand and address climate impacts of major projects. This paper examines the adequacy and outcomes of State and Commonwealth EIA processes as applied to the rapidly expanding liquified natural gas (LNG) industry and the "Burrup Hub" development. It offers practical and legal perspectives on how EIA can (and must) better address carbon and climate change

• The legal geographies of the troposphere

  Legal geographies of space, time and the material world have occupied significant attention from scholars engaged in legal geography endeavours. Australia and the Asia-Pacific region's legal geography scholarship has shown a predisposition towards engagement with environmental issues and the concomitant materialities. Increasingly, there is recognition that these materialities are not always visible to the human eye, and one such materiality that has to date been overlooked is that of the troposphere. As a previously invisibilised space most recently made visible due to the impacts of a climate-changed world - namely, bushfire-induced smoke haze - it is argued that the troposphere is the next frontier for human and more-than human activity and one that warrants explicit theoretical and empirical scholarly engagement. In addition, explicit engagement at the law-geography nexus is essential for forward-looking environmentally concerned scholarship, for which the relationship between environmental issues and materiality is now of fundamental importance to law and to societies, exacerbated by our local, national and global experiences of a world affected by climate change. Exploring this the troposphere through the lens of legal geography enables a grounded understanding of the theoretical challenges and opportunities within this increasingly visibilised space of human activity and environmental impact. In light of the role of property rights in the troposphere, this paper examines tropospheric incursions in the context of volumetric urbanism to illustrate the utility of legal geography theory, and to illustrate the legal and social importance of an empirically under-explored space

• Environmental, Planning and Climate Law in Queensland
• Law, Interdisciplinarity and 'Wicked' Problems

  This article argues that law, as a discipline, and regulation can contribute to the resolution of 'wicked' problems, such as agricultural diffuse source pollution, but that it necessitates an integration of other disciplines. While interdisciplinarity is not foreign to law, it, largely, fails to engage with theoretical frameworks and methodology to facilitate and ensure the integrity of such research

• Germany's Climate Change Agenda: A Critical Overview

  Germany's economy is the fourth-largest economy behind the US, China, and Japan, with a strong industrial base and many energy-intensive industries. Germany has been and continues to be a significant emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG). Germany has also taken on a leadership role in supporting emission reductions internationally, e.g., within the UNFCCC framework and the European Union (EU), which plays a significant role both internationally and domestically. Germany's political intentions and ambitious political goals rested on a somewhat fragmented and relatively thin legal foundation. This changed towards the end of 2019 with the passage of the Federal Climate Change Act (FCCA), which entered into force in December 2019. This framework act spells out the long-term goal of GHG-neutrality by 2050 and a 55% GHG reduction target by 2030. The FCAA must be read in conjunction with the Climate Action Plan 2050 and the Climate Protection Program 2030, which can be regarded as planning tools. Additional challenges arise from the fact that Germany has decided to phase out coal as a fuel for energy generation over the coming two decades and to take all existing nuclear power plants offthe gridin the veryshort term. The paper attempts to explain and critically analyze Germany's legal and political framework dealing with climate change with an emphasis on the difficulties of very long-term policy planning in the volatile political and economic environment with often competing interests

• Legal Geography: perspectives and methods
• Introduction by Guest Editors

Featured documents

• Accessibility to the law - the contribution of super-tribunals to fairness and simplicity in the Australian legal landscape

  If the SAT has the capacity for determining both merits and legality issues, it represents an attractive development in Australian, non- Commonwealth, tribunal jurisprudence. Peter Johnston (2005)...

• Dichotomy or trichotomy? Defining employees and independent contractors in an evolving market

  This paper analyses the distinction between an 'employee' and 'independent contractor' and its application to companies in the 'gig economy'. This question is exemplified by global debate concerning how Uber drivers are classified. The author argues that the current Australian legal test,1 absent...

• Judicial Review of Non-Statutory Executive Action: Australia and the United Kingdom

  Unlike that of the United Kingdom, the Australian law on judicial review of exercises of non-statutory executive power is undeveloped. This article proposes a constitutional basis for judicial review of such power in Australia. It then argues that, despite their constitutional differences, there...

• More Than Just a Humble Abode: The Implications of Constitutional Citizenship Rights for Passport Law

  An Australian citizen is abroad and wants to return home. The Commonwealth cancels their passport and refuses to issue a new one, effectively excluding them from Australia. What remedy does the law provide? Further to conventional administrative law grounds, this article contends the Constitution...

• The Good, the Bad and the Unhealthy: An Assessment of Australia's Compliance with the International Right to Health

  The understanding of the international right to health has flourished with the content of the right being detailed in Article 12 of the ICESCR. Despite the wide spread adoption of the ICESCR, few countries look to international standards when making domestic health care decisions. This paper seeks...

• Claims for the value of the lost contractual performance

  It is often said that contractual damages awards compensate the promisee for loss caused by breach. Statements like this are indeterminate because they leave unspecified whether such awards aim merely to make good some of the eventual deterioration in the promisee's balance sheet position...

• Indigenous land tenure reform, self-determination, and economic development: comparing Canada and Australia

  In the last two decades, both the Australian and Canadian governments have introduced reforms to Indigenous land tenure. This article compares the most significant reform from each country: the First Nations Land Management Act in Canada and township leasing in Australia. The Canadian reforms...

• The Hard Problem of Legality

  Does the Australian Constitution guarantee the rule of law? That is a hard question, and in this article, I seek to explain why. Put simply, the question is hard because our answer will depend on our broader theory of how to interpret a Constitution. If one commits to the theory of originalism, for ...

• Nationhood and Section 61 of the Constitution

  This article explores the relationship between the nationhood power and s 61 of the Constitution. It argues that, in the majority of decided cases, the nationhood power has not supported the Commonwealth Government engaging in coercive activities that would have been denied to it at common law. The ...

• The Taxation of Native Title Payments for Indigenous Groups and Resource Proponents: Convergence, Divergence and Reform

  For many years following the introduction of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth), when native title agreements were a new concept with few precedents, parties generally paid limited attention to taxation issues, or tried to obviate the need to do so. Over the last decade, awareness of the significance...