Anna Grear

Bringing together leading international scholars in the field, this Research Handbook interrogates, from various angles and positions, the fractious relationship between human rights and the environment and between human rights and environmental law. The Handbook provides researchers and students with a fertile source of reflection and engagement with this most important of contemporary legal relationships. Law’s complex role in the mediation of the relationship between humanity and the living order is richly reflected in this timely and authoritative collection.

The issue is no longer whether climate change is happening; it is rather what we should now be doing about it. Drawing together key thinkers and policy experts, this unique volume – also a Special Issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment – engages with the human dimensions of climate change, offering a timely intervention into contemporary debates about the challenging relationship between law and society in a time of climate crisis. The book addresses: climate change as a crisis of human hierarchy; climate justice; the complicity of law in climate injustice; the rights of future generations; the nature of climate duties; the interplay between trade law and climate change strategies; and the nature of the policy responses now required to address
the crisis. The result is an imaginative, well-informed and provocative collection of contemporary engagements with the greatest challenge of the age, concerned not only to understand the current crisis but to offer perspectives on how it can be addressed. At the heart of this volume is the conviction that change is urgent, possible and morally imperative.
Contributors: John Knox, United Nations Independent Expert on Climate Change; Mary Robinson, Director of the Mary Robinson Institute: Climate Justice;
Oliver De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food; Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action; Conor Gearty, Director of the Institute
of Public Affairs, London School of Economics; Henry Shue, Senior Research Fellow Merton College, and Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford; Marcus Hedahl, Dahrendorf Postdoctoral Fellow; Anna Grear, Dahrendorf Visiting Fellow and Director of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE); Stephen Humphrey, Associate Professor of International Law, London School of Economics.

Martha Albertson Fineman’s earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependencies as a way of problematizing the core assumptions underlying the ‘autonomous’ subject of liberal law and politics in the context of US equality discourse. Her ‘vulnerability thesis’ represents the evolution of that earlier work and situates human vulnerability as a critical heuristic for exploring alternative legal and political foundations. This book draws together major British and American scholars who present different perspectives on the concept of vulnerability and Fineman's ‘vulnerability thesis’. The contributors include scholars who have thought about vulnerability in different ways and contexts prior to encountering Fineman’s work, as well as those for whom Fineman’s work provided an introduction to thinking through a vulnerability lens. This collection demonstrates the broad and intellectually exciting potential of vulnerability as a theoretical foundation for legal and political engagements with a range of urgent contemporary challenges.

Exploring ways in which vulnerability might provide a new ethical foundation for law and politics, the book will be of interest to the general reader, as well as academics and students in fields such as jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics.
Contents: Introduction: vulnerability as heuristic - an invitation to future exploration, Martha Albertson Fineman and Anna Grear; Equality, autonomy, and the vulnerable subject in law and politics, Martha Albertson Fineman; Kierkegaard and vulnerability, Alison Assiter; Vulnerability, advanced global capitalism and co-symptomatic injustice: locating the vulnerable subject, Anna Grear; Vulnerability and the liberal order, Sean Coyle; More than utopia, Morgan Cloud; After the storm: the vulnerability and resilience of locally owned business, Susan S. Kuo and Benjamin Means; Housing the vulnerable subject: the English context, Helen Carr; Assisted reproductive technology provision and the vulnerability thesis: from the UK to the global market, Rachel Anne Fenton; A quiet revolution: vulnerability in the European Court of Human Rights, Alexandra Timmer; Animals as vulnerable subjects: beyond interest-convergence, hierarchy, and property, Ani B. Satz; Bibliography; Index.
About the Editor: Martha Albertson Fineman is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University. A leading authority on family law and feminist jurisprudence, Fineman is the founding director of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, an interdisciplinary scholarly project she began at the University of Wisconsin in 1984. Since 2007, she also directs Emory’s Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative, an interdisciplinary project housed in the Laney Graduate School. Her scholarly work focuses on various aspects of the legal regulation of intimacy and on the social, cultural, and legal implications of human dependency and vulnerability and includes The Neutered Mother, The Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (1995) and The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (2004).

Anna Grear is Reader in Law at Cardiff Law School and Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is a Global Affiliate of the Vulnerability and Human Condition Initiative at Emory University in the USA. Anna's work focuses upon the law's construction of the human and of the human relationship with the world, broadly understood, with a particular emphasis upon the environment and globalisation. Anna’s scholarship is best known for its critical deconstruction of corporate human rights claims and related explorations of legal rights subjectivity. Her 2010 monograph, Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity has been welcomed as constituting 'a new ground of contestation' and marking a fresh start 'towards understanding the ontology of human rights'. Anna is also Director of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment and founder and Co-editor in Chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.
Reviews: ‘Fineman and Grear have assembled a diverse range of original contributions which build upon Martha Fineman's vulnerability theory. Here we see its full potential to challenge the disembodied, atomised liberal subject. International, wide ranging, sophisticated yet grounded, Vulnerability imagines a way of life that questions the assumptions underpinning our neoliberal world order.’
Carl F. Stychin, City University London, UK

'This is an excellent collection and - as vulnerability analysis gains traction across disciplines and jurisdictions - it could not be more timely. The refraction of Martha Fineman’s development of vulnerability as an analytical space through different philosophical, jurisprudential and political lenses, confirms for us that her vulnerability thesis is emerging as a compelling and essential counter-theory.'
Michael Thomson, University of Leeds, UK

‘Vulnerability is a theoretically and empirically rich exploration into a conceptual framework that has the potential to fundamentally redefine how scholars think about social welfare, gender issues, economic inequality, and human rights. Each essay provides deep insights into how the liberal order has effaced the pervasiveness of vulnerability and suggests bold new reformulations that place responsibility on the state for promoting a more just social order. The collection is animated by a common theme: the ethical implications of an embodied life and how more responsive juridical, economic and political arrangements potentially emerge from a vulnerability approach. This path breaking book will be of enormous value to scholars from a wide range of disciplines but with a common interest in developing conceptual tools to reimagine the role of the state in addressing structural inequality.’
Kristin Bumiller, Amherst College, USA

‘Emanating from Martha Fineman’s earlier critical legal theory, these stimulating essays situate the notion of vulnerability and adjacent ideas about harm and responsibility at the heart of human rights research. Through careful but critical reflection on ethics, human vulnerability, the responsive state and civil society, the authors map out a systematic response to the problematic assumptions of the sovereign self in liberal contract theory. A major development in legal studies, Fineman and Grear’s edited collection will become a standard reference in law, social sciences and humanities.’
Bryan S. Turner, City University of New York, USA

‘Taking off from Martha Fineman’s foundational principle of human vulnerability, this collection soars with ambitious and original thinking so urgently needed to confront the daunting challenges of our time. It stands as a major resource for building law and policy on firmer ground beyond the quagmires of disembodied individualism.’
Martha McCluskey, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

This special issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment revisits Professor Christopher D. Stone's iconic 1972 article, and features an introduction by Professor Philippe Sands QC, a set of elegant and thought-provoking reflections on the original article by Baroness Mary Warnock, Professor Ngaire Naffine and Professor Lorraine Code, and an equally elegant and thought-provoking response to their reflections from Professor Stone himself. This thoughtful collection of essays will be a valuable addition to contemporary debates concerning the crucial search for new relationships between humanity and the living world and between human rights and the environment. The renowned contributors offer rich reflections on questions of legal standing, legal subjectivity and epistemology raised by Stone's article, and which have greater salience than ever as we face the environmental and human challenges of the 21st century.

Set against the backdrop of globalisation, this book responds to the mounting evidence of corporate subversion of the UDHR paradigm of human rights.  The book explores the complex tendencies within law that are implicated in the emergence of 'corporate humanity' - presenting a critical reading of the closures invoked by legal subjectivity to explain law's special receptivity to the corporate form.  The counter-thesis developed suggests that embodied vulnerability should form the foundation of international human rights subjectivity, a foundation that tends to problematise corporate human rights discourse.

Bringing together an international range of academics, Gender, Law and Sexualities provides a comprehensive interrogation of the range of issues - both topical and controversial - raised by the gendered character of law and legal discourse. The gendering of law, legal persons and the legal profession, along with the gender bias of legal outcomes, has been a fractious, but fertile, focus of reflection. It has, moreover, been an important site of political struggle. This collection of essays offers an unrivalled examination of its various contemporary dimensions: focusing on issues of theory and representation; on violence, both national and international; and on marriage and the family. Gender, Law and Sexualities will be invaluable for all those engaged in research and study in the areas of law relating to gender and feminist studies. (Taken from publisher website!)

This journal was founded in 2009 to examine the importance interface between human rights and the environment.  With an Editorial Board of excellent quality, the journal has already been praised for the high quality of its contributions.  Future contributors include: Laura Westra, Louis Kotze, Naomi Roht-Arriaza, David Nibert, David Kinley, Sarah Joseph, Martha Fineman, Paedar Kirby and a host of others.

The present reflection draws upon a tradition of energetic, world-facing critical legal scholarship to interrogate the anthropos assumed by the terminology of ‘anthropocentrism’ and of the ‘Anthropocene’. The article concludes that any ethically responsible future engagement with ‘anthropocentrism’ and/or with the ‘Anthropocene’ must explicitly engage with the oppressive hierarchical structure of the anthropos itself—and should directly address its apotheosis in the corporate juridical subject that dominates the entire globalised order of the Anthropocene age.

The search for mandatory international human rights law accountability for trans- national corporations has long been one of the most challenging struggles facing human rights advocates and the victims of powerful rights-violating corporate actors alike. Reflecting on the extent to which the US case of Kiobel makes a difference in the light of the ‘closing of the door’ on a much-favoured activist litigation strategy, the authors argue that the neo-liberal structural order within which corporate accountabil- ity is sought means that all strategies, no matter how promising, are potentially undermined by corporate and/or ideological capture. The challenge of ending corporate impunity for gross violations of human rights demands the imposition of mandatory forms of direct corporate human rights responsibility, but the nature of the neo-liberal structural context should be understood to mandate continuous critical reflexivity, even if and when mandatory corporate human rights law accountability is established.

(JHRE Editorial) There can be little doubt of the multiple complexities facing law in the twenty-first century. Climate change alone presents a challenge of unprecedented global complexity for legal systems – a complexity arising, moreover, directly from the ‘complexity of the climate system [itself:] its myriad of parts, interactions, feedbacks and unsolved mysteries’. In the face of such complexities, law's traditional institutional silos and path-dependent responses (such as the institutional and doctrinal separation between, for example, human rights law and climate change law) seem increasingly exposed as inadequate.

The recent high-level emergence of ‘climate justice’ in the normative and policy discourse addressing the social and legal aspects of climate change is welcome. However, certain dangers of co-option face the concept as it gains institutional traction. Drawing on a cri- tical theoretical reading of the patterns of climate injustice and their relationship with liberal legal subjectivity (and with the related themes of the politics of dis/embodiment, corporate juridical privilege, (neo)colonialism and the highly uneven structure of glo- balized world order), this article argues that ‘climate justice’ is more likely to sustain the necessary resistive critical energies if informed by critical legal reflection on histor- ical and contemporary patterns of climate injustice, particularly as they emerge in rela- tion to the privileged trope of liberal legal subjectivity and the juridical privileging of the corporate form. Future policy directions indicated by the analysis are briefly introduced.

This chapter offers one passing presentation of the goal that the Oñati workshop set out towards. It is an attempt to draw together threads of philosophy, doctrine, policy, praxis and activism as an uneven thread in a far wider, urgent conversation bringing human rights and the environment into a new relationship. This new relationship necessarily requires, as I argue below, a radical worldview transformation inaugurating a new ‘human’ subjectivity and, inseparably, a new socio-juridical imaginary reflecting a new vision of ‘the world’.

While some accounts of rights and property paradigms see property as an inherent incident of a colonizing form of human rights law and discourse, others draw out the contradictions between them, suggesting that human rights and property have opposing impulses towards inclusion and exclusion respectively. While not rejecting the insights of either of these positions, the author argues that a fundamental ambivalence lies at the heart of human rights law and discourse demonstrating both oppressive and emancipatory potential.

One misconception accompanying the idea of a feminist judgment is that feminist judgment is inherently at odds with the putative neutrality of the “judge” as a “neutral” adjudicator. Many lawyers, scholars and law students tend to assume that when deliberating as a judge, feminism (s) simply has/have no rightful or rational place, relevance or bearing upon the process or the outcome and that such a “non-neutral” view will necessarily deviate from the standard canons of judicial reasoning by embodying an unacceptable bias.

This paper examines the interplay between discourses of exclusion and inclusion in the relationship between land law and human rights. It explores the common law conception of property in land and its relationship with the conceptual structure of property before suggesting that the particular form the conception takes in the English common law is problematic as a discourse of exclusion in the light of inclusive human rights considerations. However, further submerged exclusions in law are also explored, suggesting a problematic ideological continuity between land law and human rights law, notwithstanding identifiable surface tensions between them as contrasting discourses. Once the continuity of hidden exclusions is identified, the paper explores the theoretical unity between the deep structure of property as ‘propriety’ and human rights as ‘what is due’, and suggests their mutual potential for embracing more inclusive concerns. Finally, two modest proposals for future theoretical reform are offered: the need for a more anthropologically adequate and inclusive construct of the human being as legal actor, and the need for a more differentiated, context-sensitive formulation of the common law1 property conception, one capable of reconciling conceptually necessary elements of excludability with inclusive human rights impulses.

Abstract Two influential approaches to conceptualising the relationship between public and private law have suggested that the distinction between them should be abandoned. The first, as exemplified by Oliver, suggests that the distinction should be abandoned in favour of fusion based on the notion of commonality. The second, as exemplified by Teubner, rejects fusion, arguing for the replacement of the distinction with a concept capturing the multi-dimensional complexity of law in multiple social contexts:polycontexturality'.

ABSTRACT The chapter examines the gendered nature of legal rationality, and proposes that rather than deploying 'hybridity' in order to escape a binary construction, a complexity sensitive, dynamic spectrum of spectrums imagined as fully embodied, shifting and mutable is theoretically preferable, since it allows the 'spectrum-extreme' languages fundamental to political resistance to remain powerful, while unseating binary notions of sex/gender.