Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise: Shaping the Brexit Process, CAROLYN ABBOT AND MARIA LEE, London: UCL Press, 2021, 226 pp., open access
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | RICHARD MOORHEAD |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12313 |
DOI: ./j ols.
BOOK REVIEW
Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise:
Shaping the Brexit Process
CAROLYN ABBOT MARIA LEE
London: UCL Press, , pp., open access
In Environment Groups and Legal Expertise: Shaping the Brexit Process, Carolyn Abbot and Maria
Lee develop and explore a fresh dimension to work on lawyeringfor social movements. This short,
open-access book is a rich contribution. It builds on a legal mobilization literature that has cen-
tred, to date, on litigation as a primary tactic of legal mobilization.Its particular focus is legal
mobilization by environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), examining how they
use law to shape social change at a particularly volatile point in the life of the English legal sys-
tem, Brexit. The authors examine the ideas, demands, and influence wielded by legal expertise,
as NGOs sought to lobby for their view of the best Environment Bill. They do so through elite
interviews with lawyers and others heavilyconnected with the Brexit/environmental debates (and
most connected with the NGO sector), and consideration of over submissions to Select Com-
mittee inquiries on Brexit/environmental matters.
Abbot and Lee demonstrate how NGOs seeking to effect social change utilized a wider range of
strategies than the cause-lawyering literature typically considers. The book’s richness comes, in
part, from the drawing together of three separate topics: Brexit,environmental NGO politics, and
work on lawyer expertise. The authors’ experience and knowledge of the passage of the Environ-
ment Bill, and of environmental issues related to Brexit more generally, leads to a deeply embed-
ded study of how legal expertise was both influential, but also sometimes absent, during a process
marked by the politics of Brexit.
Brexit, and the resulting translation of European Union (EU) environmental protections into
‘equivalent but different’ domestic law, created what Abbot and Lee call ‘hybrid political-legal
opportunities’: political dialogues in which legal expertise was particularly important and pow-
erful. It is why, whether, and how legal expertise within NGOs active in the environmental field
was mobilized and to what effect that concerns them. The authors recognize that this case study of
law and politics in action is marked by a unique temporal and political context. The peculiarities
of two Conservative governments – Theresa May’s, a government without a majority, and Boris
Johnson’s, a government and Parliamentwaylaid by COVID- – met the once-in-a-lifetime legal
and political phenomenon of Brexit. Abbot and Lee elegantly explain how the need for ‘colossal
amounts of government and Parliamentary activity’ to exit the EU created a massive technical
See, for example, L. Vanhala and J. Kinghan, Literature Review on the Use and Impact of Litigation (), at <https:
//publiclawproject.org.uk/content/uploads///Literature-Review.pdf>.
© The Author.Journal of Law and Society © Cardiff University Law School
490 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jols J.Law Soc. ;:–.
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