Exploring the Landscape of Climate Law and Scholarship: Two Emerging Trends
Exploring the landscape of climate law, this chapter identifies two emerging trends increasingly visible in climate law scholarship. The first relates to the multi-layered nature of climate law. Here, the chapter argues that our understanding of the complex web of legal norms that address climate change necessitates research that also takes into consideration interactions between various sources of legal authority in regulating climate change, including their hierarchies, synergies and tensions. In addition to benefitting those implementing climate law on the ground, such an approach makes it possible to analyse the global implications of climate law, including its effectiveness and the mutual supportiveness of its various layers. The second relates to deformalization of climate law; the expanding role of non-state actors, soft law instruments and informal collaboration in global efforts to address climate change. While climate law scholarship is increasingly paying attention to this phenomenon, this chapter argues that accounting for the role of non-state actors and voluntary regulatory initiatives involves some important doctrinal challenges, including how to avoid becoming overtly descriptive and retain a normative focus.
A critical analysis of the Kyoto protocol's second commitment period.
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School Principals and Education Law: What do they know, what do they need to know?
Principals now work in complex and challenging environments where uncertainty and change are the hallmarks of their roles and responsibilities. As such, the knowledge and capability demands on principals have expanded, including those related to education law. While these matters attracted some research interest a number of years ago, there has been little recent work in the area of principals and education law. This article reports on an exploratory study into aspects of the legal knowledge held by Tasmanian government school principals, particularly concerning non-sexual physical contact between teachers and students. The research was undertaken using a small-scale, mixed-methods research design, which required principals to respond to various legal scenarios. Three key findings emerged from the study. First, principals used two different levels of working knowledge about education law  one related to legal problems, and the other to legally-related routine activities. Second, on the particular topic of physical contact, some knowledge held by principals was not legally accurate. Third, for major legal issues, participants indicated that they acquired access to information from legal experts. The situation for routine legal matters was less clear, although in-service training and practical experience were identified as potential sources of knowledge. Participants recognised the importance of a sound knowledge of education law, especially for dealing with security and safety issues and preferred to access further information through in-service training. Notably, the findings of the study are broadly consistent with those from earlier Australian and international research, suggesting that much remains to be done in the area of principals’ education law knowledge.