The Critical Legal Research Laboratory at the Faculty of Law, Université de Sherbrooke, will hold a high-level, bilingual conference entitled “Down to Earth: Critical Legal Approaches and the Environment” on 13 and 14 June 2016 in room A6-3003. This conference will bring together some thirty international experts: eminent research scholars, students, as well as stakeholders from community, legal, and environmental settings.

This event will make the link between two themes that are rarely combined, namely critical legal approaches and the environment. In the current environmental crisis, neither domestic nor international law seems capable of fulfilling its protective promise and ensuring a clean environment for present and future generations. Why not? The conference is meant to consider this problem by calling into question the fundamental principles of domestic and international environmental law, as well as the understandings of nature that are presupposed by law. The goal of the conference is to promote the adoption of new legal norms that will concretize environmental protection for the public and for local populations, and for aboriginal populations in particular. The conference aims to permit participants to develop such avenues of research at the theoretical as well as the practical level.

 The themes to be addressed : History and the genealogy of domestic and international environmental law – The contribution of ecofeminist, Third World and environmental justice approaches to an understanding of the problems of domestic and international environmental law – Critical environmental approaches and Green Legal Theory – The conceptualization of non-human animals in environmental law – The contestation of law, law as a tool of emancipation, and citizen and aboriginal struggles for environmental protection.

Official program

* This year, our conference is organized in partnership with the Strategies and Actors of Environmental Governance Research Group (SAGE). We would like to thank, for their support in making this conference possible, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Law Faculty of the University of Sherbrooke, the Support program for students holding scientific conferences (PSTCSE) from the University of Sherbrooke, the Graduate Students' Group of the University of Sherbrooke (REMDUS) as well as the General Association of Graduate Students in Law of the University of Sherbrooke (AGECSDUS).