Course Recording:
Course Description:
As courts have begun to recognize the relationship between human and environmental rights, they have increasingly turned their attention to the ways in which environmental degradation, including that which is caused by climate change, affects the right to live with dignity. Thus, courts from countries as diverse as Nigeria, Colombia, Nepal, and Pakistan have recognized that the right to dignity includes a right to live in a clean and stable environment. This class provides an overview of the burgeoning right to human dignity as recognized in international law and in constitutions around the world, and then examine how courts have used dignity rights to advance environmental protection, including protection from climate change.
Recommended Reading:
(All titles by Erin Daly and James R. May unless designated otherwise.)
“The UN Sustainable Development Goals and Dignity Under Law,” in International Environmental Lawmaking and Diplomacy Review 2019, 15-33 (University of Eastern Finland)(Tuula Honkonen & Seita Romppanen, eds.), available at:https://sites.uef.fi/cceel/wp-content/uploads/sites/185/2020/12/2019-MEA-Course-Review_Official.pdf, SSRN here
“Environmental Dignity Rights,” in James R May & Erin Daly, eds., Encyclopedia of Human Rights and the Environment: Legality, Indivisibility, dignity and Geography Current Global Challenges (Edward Elgar Pub., 2019), available here
“Environmental Dignity Rights” in The Effectiveness of Environmental Law (Sandrine Maljean-Dubois, ed. Intersentia 2017), SSRN here, bepress here, available here
Bridging Constitutional Dignity and Environmental Rights Jurisprudence, 7 Jrnl. Hum. Rights and the Envt. 218 (2016), SSRN here, bepress here, available here
Dina Lupin Townsend, The Place of Human Dignity in Environmental Adjudication, 3 Oslo L. Rev. 27 (2016) available here
Instructors:
Erin Daly is Professor of Law at Delaware Law School and the Director of the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment. She has written extensively and, with James R. May, co-authored and co-edited numerous articles and volumes on environmental constitutionalism, including Global Environmental Constitutionalism (2015), Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism(2018), the Encyclopedia of Human Rights and the Environment: Indivisibility, Dignity, Legality, Geography (2019), and the Judicial Handbook on Environmental Constiutionalism and Compendium of Cases (3d edition 2019), used in UN Environment judicial workshops worldwide. She is Executive Director of Dignity Rights International, which advances the human right to dignity throughout the world through education, advocacy, and consultation. She is the author ofDignity Rights: Courts, Constitutions, and the Worth of the Human Person (2013) (with a foreword by Aharon Barak), a comparative analysis of the global jurisprudence of the right to human dignity and the o-author of the first casebook on Dignity Law: Global Recognition, Cases, and Perspectives (with Jimmy May). Her first book, Reconciliation in Divided Societies: Finding Common Ground (2006), co-authored with South African scholar Jeremy Sarkin and with an Introduction by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, considered transitional and transformative justice after political upheaval. She serves as the US National Correspondent for the Centre international de droit comparé de l’environnement (CIDCE) and is a member of the Normandy Chair for Peace and the Global Pandemic Network.
James R. May, Esq. is Distinguished Professor of Law, Founder of the Global Environmental Rights Institute, and co-Founder of the Dignity Rights Project at Widener University.
May is the President and co-Founder of Dignity Rights International, and a Board member of the Normandy Chair for Peace, the Earth Law Center, and Delaware GreenWatch. He serves as the Special Representative on Harmony With Nature for the International Council of Environmental Law, and chairs the American Bar Association Section on Environment, Energy and Resources’ Task Force on Environmental Justice. He is an inductee of the American College of Environmental Lawyers, the Delaware Valley Environmental Inn of Court, the National Judicial College, and Phi Kappa Phi.
May has published widely in Environmental Human Rights, including Encyclopedia of Human Rights and the Environment (2020), Environmental Rights: The Development of Standards (2019), Judicial Handbook on Environmental Constitutionalism (3d. Ed. 2019), Judicial Handbook on Environmental Constitutionalism: Compendium of Cases (2d ed. 2019), Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism (2018), The Future of Sustainable Energy, (2016), New Frontiers in Environmental Constitutionalism (2016), Environmental Constitutionalism (2016), Global Environmental Constitutionalism (Cambridge 2015), and Principles of Constitutional Environmental Law (2011). He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including from the Sierra Club, American Canoe Association, and Pace University Haub School of Law, and LawDragon as one of the world’s most influential environmental lawyers.
