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"This collection invites environmental law scholars to reflect on what it means to be an environmental law scholar and to consider how and why environmental law scholars engage in environmental law scholarship. Leading environmental law scholars from different backgrounds and jurisdictions offer their personal reflections on the nature, form, quality and challenges of environmental law scholarship. The collection offers the first honest introspection on what environmental law scholarship is and is not. It considers the unique contributions of environmental law scholarship to legal scholarship more generally, reflecting on what sets environmental law scholarship apart from other disciplines of legal scholarship and the challenges arising from these differences"--

Public environmental law, many argue, is a young discipline originating in the late 1960s, when environmental problems became recognised by politics, policy and the public. Environmental law scholarship is therefore searching for greater recognition among more established legal subjects and in academia in general. To date, few academic voices have attempted to reflect on environmental law as a discipline discussing methodological and interdisciplinary challenges. This paper provides a contribution to this emerging literature by asking whether the boundaries of environmental law scholars can be pushed beyond the social sciences and whether interdisciplinary encounters with natural scientists can be made in the present context of U.K. Universities. It argues that, if interdisciplinary research between environmental law scholars and other social scientists is developing, the interactions between environmental law scholarship and natural scientists are more embryonic. The chapter sketches some of the institutional and epistemological challenges that arise from attempted interdisciplinary collaborations of this sort. More specifically, in relation to the institutional challenges it discusses first the rise of the "audit culture" in U.K. Universities and what the Research Excellence Framework (REF) means for such interdisciplinary collaborations and, second the rise of doctoral training partnerships with interdisciplinary pathways and cross-council scholarship attached to them and their limitations. As for the epistemological challenges, the extent to which knowledge formation is understood differently between the macro-sciences (natural sciences and social sciences) is discussed. Borrowing from the insights of the Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature, the chapter argues that the boundaries between the natural and the social are blurred and so they are between disciplines. It is argued that the demarcation of disciplines is more a product of current institutional practices and assertions of authority than an inherent epistemological difference between disciplines.

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, major thinkers in the international legal field address the goals of the twenty-first century and how international law can address the needs of the world community.The result is a volume of outstanding scholarship that will appeal to all those – lawyers, political scientists, and educated laymen— interested in international law, legal theory, human rights, international investment law and commercial arbitration, boundary issues, law of the sea, and law of armed conflict.