Book Review: Environmental Protection and Human Rights

Date01 March 2015
Published date01 March 2015
DOI10.1177/0964663914560970b
Subject MatterBook Reviews
conversation that has potential to cross a number of academic disciplines, and for that
reason alone, this is a valuable book which could be used as a basis for future collabora-
tive research.
JENNY SCOTT
University of Glasgow, UK
References
Austin JL (1955) How to Do Things with Words, The William James Lectures Delivered at
Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
George A (2003) The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin Books.
Graham C (2003) Ordering Law: The Architectural and Social History of the English Law Court to
1914. Aldershot and Vermont: Ashgate
Lurie A (1992) The Language of Clothes. London: Bloomsbury.
Mulcahy L (2007) Architects of justice: The politics of courtroom design. Social & Legal Studies.
16(3): 383–403.
Mulcahy L (2011) Legal Architecture, Justice, Due Process and the Place of Law. Oxford and
New York: Routledge.
DONALD K ANTON AND DINAH L SHELTON, Environmental Protection and Human Rights.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 1124, ISBN 9780521747103, £65.00 (pbk).
We are in the third decade of ‘human rights as environmental rights’. Starting points for
the engagement may be taken as the Final Report of the UN Sub-Commission on Human
Rights and the Environment prepared by Special Rapporteur Ksentini (1994) and the
touchstone publication of Boyle and Anderson, Human Rights Approaches to Environ-
mental Protection (1996). The literature, and indeed the practice, of this relationship has
since expanded rapidly, across legal sub-disciplines, levels and jurisdictions. As this
volume’s table of content elaborates, the scope of human rights to deliver environmental
protection includes institutional considerations (Chapter 5), procedural and substantive
rights (Chapters 6 and 7), the world of public international finance (Chapter 10), corpo-
rate actors (Chapter 11) and so on. In debates that have attended this widening and dee-
pening, Sheldon has been a leading participant and so her collaboration with Anton to
survey systematically the range of materials is extremely welcome.
This is a cases and materials book. Each chapter opens with a couple of pages of stage
setting, followed by lengthy extracts legal texts (treaties, cases, articles, reports, etc.),
which are in turn followed by questions and discussion points and occasional notes.
As well as being comprehensive in scope (the 118 pages of Chapter 1: ‘Law and the
Environment’ could easily serve as a self-standing textbook for courses on international
environmental law), these materials combine to excellent effect, not least because of the
pithy, incisive notes – see the discussion on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Pulp
Mills case (pp. 28–30). That said, there could be better internal cross-referencing. For
Book Reviews 141

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