Teaching environmental law, ethics and sustainability - case study

Subject/module: environmental law and ethics
Level: masters (LLM in Marine Law/MSc in Sustainable Environmental Management)
Pre-requisites: a good honours degree
Cohort: 35 (4 per group for group work)
Summary: module on environmental law, ethics and sustainability
Contact: Simon Payne (e-mail:simon.payne@plymouth.ac.uk) and Jason Lowther, University of Plymouth (e-mail: jason.lowther@plymouth.ac.uk)

In this module students synthesise materials and ideas on law, ethics and sustainability in the context of law as one of the policy tools used to seek to deliver sustainable development. It is designed to be accessible to students with a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, and has a significant emphasis on student centred learning and group work.

The learners are a mix of law and non-law graduates – the LLM students are required to have a good honours degree in law or a discipline with a substantial content of law, and for the MSc a degree in areas such as marine science, environmental science or geography. The learners come from a range of countries, including the USA, Malaysia, Spain, France and Italy.

Mode of delivery

Teaching consists of lectures, whole group discussions and group debate, based around 5 × 3 hour blocks:

• lectures – at this level taking the form of Socratic style discussion (1 hour/1 hour 15 mins)
• time for groups to prepare arguments (30 minutes)
• presentation of viewpoints (for example on wolf culling) and voting (both before and after arguments have been presented), plus discussion and reflection on viewpoints (1 hour; unassessed)
• breaks (2 × 10 minutes) There is a huge volume of literature underpinning environmental ethics and law and sustainability. A selective approach is therefore adopted in the classroom, providing structure and a manageable volume of learning, with a wider base of reading materials and an inclusive approach taken in assessment. (Students are encouraged to explore reading and ideas beyond the lecture programme, and rewarded if they do so.)
  Basic structure of sessions:

• general ethical approaches highlighting utilitarian/consequentialist (Bentham), deontological/duty (Kant) and virtue ethics (Aristotle)
• links between ethics and law, using case study illustrations of cases taking different ethical approaches, for example Gillingham BC v Medway Dock [1993] QB 343
• environmental ethics – anthropocentricism in various forms, non-anthropocentric individualism and animal rights, biocentric and ecocentric approaches
• sustainability and sustainable development as ethics, policy and law
  Resources used:

• lecture handouts
• webpages, for example:
  • Wild law (UKELA)
  • The tragedy of the commons (1968 essay by Garrett Hardin)
  • basic ethical approaches: Virture ethics, Deontological ethics, Consequentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• VLE providing weblinks, reading lists, copies of lecture handouts and module guidance notes
• library and electronic resources
• wider sustainability provisions within the university, such as the Centre for Sustainable Futures

Learning approach and intended outcomes

Students are introduced to competing theoretical models, for example utilitarian, virtue, deontological and teleological approaches, as well as to ecology and environmental ethics, including ‘deep ecology’ ecofeminism, Gaia theory and wild law.

It is intended that learners will be able to:

• understand the meaning of sustainable development and sustainability in the context of legal literature
• explain the ideas underlying environmental ethics and responsibility for future generations
• critically assess a range of ethical viewpoints in relation to sustainability issues, for example biodiversity or environmental liability
• explain the relationships of sustainable development to the policy principles underpinning environmental law and regulation
  The disparate disciplinary backgrounds and international nature of the group influenced curriculum design in the following ways:

• some learners lacked legal literacy – consideration is given to the language chosen, and time is spent in class and with linked reading to provide an overview of the nature of law, legal systems and policy
• some learners lacked skills to engage with online and library materials in law – so the law librarian sets a library exercise including the location and interpretation of sustainability related law materials from paper, Web and database sources
• the overall approach is not to teach the law of England and Wales or even the European Union, but to look at the role of law and the legal system in the delivery of environmental policy, protection and regulation, in particular around sustainability and sustainable development, using case study examples (mostly from the UK and EU, but some drawn from other jurisdictions, including the USA, New Zealand, South Africa and India)
• the topics for assessment and discussion are a combination of law, policy and ethics – this means that no one group of students is at a significant advantage in terms of background

Assessment strategy

Some feedback is intrinsic to the nature of the class – a student may ask a question or make an observation during the lecture and receive immediate feedback, or during the course of a group’s presentation of its viewpoint often there will be peer or tutor feedback as comments are made on the arguments put.

There are two formative summative assessments:

• group presentation to the peer group on a topic selected from a list or agreed with the tutor (informal feedback given by both tutors and peers at the end)
• written paper based on the presentation, written in the style of a short article for a journal

Critieria for the group presentation:

• content
• structure and coherence
• style including presentation skills (clear delivery – no distracting behaviour – interaction with audience – pace – appropriate use of OHPs/PowerPoint)

Criteria for the group written paper

• content (depth – relevance – coverage – range of sources)
• structure and coherence
• style including written communication (grammar and spelling – presentation and appropriateness to brief)

Outcomes for learners

Feedback has been positive with a high satisfaction rating. MSc learners commented on the way that aspects of the learning dovetail with the policy aspects of their other modules; and welcomed the opportunity to talk through ‘ethical’ approaches to law. LLM students reflected on the different perspectives offered as a rationale for regulation, and stated that they were better able to contextualise some International Maritime Organisation initiatives.

Formal feedback is received through the external examining process for a number of the MSc awards which access this module. The examiner, a professional with Natural England and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, has consistently reported a high degree of learner satisfaction with the module after meetings with the cohorts, and has also made positive references to the approach taken in the minutes of subject/award board meetings.

Assessment scores have remained consistently high over a period of years, as would be expected.

Reflections

Students find the module interesting and challenging intellectually, placing law in a broad context of policy and philosophy and providing opportunities for analysis and synthesis of material. The students are able to undertake independent research and to present their own perspective and critique of law and policy – but within a clear analytical framework (ethics).

This model is almost certainly only suitable for masters level. Students are asked to synthesise a range of materials (legal and non legal) and to show a high degree of autonomy.

Expecting too much legal detail from a very mixed group is not necessarily realistic. However selective depth, relating to ethical debates and their application, appears to overcome this potential hurdle.

It is always challenging to pack this much of an overview of ethics into such a small space, involving risks of over-simplification or exclusion of reference to key philosophers some students regard as essential. This risk has been managed by a clear ‘health warning’ around the parameters of the module, as well as enabling and rewarding students who explore beyond the confines of the class and directed reading in their assessment task, but remains a key tension.

We recently experimented with delivery of the environmental ethics area by a specialist in that area – this did not work well according to student feedback, as the three areas (ethics, law and sustainability) were not well integrated. The students struggled to build a coherent understanding of all three areas.

This inevitably means that at least one of the three areas is taught by a non specialist – the ethics area is delivered by a lawyer with a strong policy understanding. This involves both considerable investment of time in reading the substantial ethics materials available and risks of having an insufficiently strong academic depth in ethics, however these concerns have never been raised in student feedback in many years of operating the course.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010