Greening Constitutional Law: Pedagogical Pathways to Ecological Well-Being

Examining anthropocentric assumptions embedded in Australian constitutional law and exploring the potential for incremental norm change through legal education.

Project summary

This project examines anthropocentric assumptions embedded in Australian constitutional law and explores the potential for incremental norm change through legal education. It targets constitutional law due to its status as fundamental law: establishing the basic framework of governance and the foundational source of legal norms. Unlike initiatives that focus on constitutional law as an instrument of environmental policy, it addresses how nature and human-nature relationships are configured in constitutional reasoning. Focusing on constitutional law cases taught in the core curriculum, the project develops resources that encourage students to think about how legal reasoning reproduces views about nature’s value and human-nature relationships. By targeting legal education, the project reshapes how future lawyers, judges, and legal officials engage with constitutional law.

What are we interested in?

Australian legal education focuses on reading cases (i.e. the decisions of courts, also referred to as ‘judgments’) and discerning the rules of law that cases establish. Understanding the judicial reasoning underpinning these rules is a critical skill developed in law school. We are interested in producing teaching resources that will help law students critically reflect on: (a) how judicial reasoning in case law explicitly or implicitly reflects an anthropocentric bias and (b) what an ecologically-conscious judgment would look like.

The goals of our project

Ultimately, the project helps shift legal norms away from an unsustainable anthropocentric paradigm by integrating an ecological well-being perspective into mainstream legal education. Although the project focuses on constitutional law, we anticipate that this approach could be adopted in other legal subjects taught in the core curriculum.

Outcomes / activities

The project is developing curriculum resources designed to support the integration of an ecological well-being perspective into constitutional law teaching across Australia, developed in partnership with collaborators at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law’s successful legal education program. This includes teaching modules, case-based discussion materials, and educator guides tailored for use in the core curriculum. These materials will be refined and developed through a pilot and two facilitated workshops at Melbourne Law School and the University of New South Wales, in partnership with the Gilbert + Tobin Centre for Public Law.