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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents preliminary findings from a largescale history of Australian environmental lawyers across five decades. It explains the central design principles of this life writing project, a prosopography, conducted across three years and concentrating on over 40 lawyer subjects.

Paper long abstract:

Lawyers are crucial facilitators and legitimators of social causes, who have shaped Australian law and politics. Yet they continue to be conceptualised by social scientists, historians and even some legal academics, in ways that suggest that their importance to the nation is either marginal or purely instrumental. The activities of environmental lawyers provide rich material for challenging these dominant portrayals.

In the last 50 years environmental lawyers publicly critiqued the economic policies of successive state and federal administrations and corporations and translated these criticisms into legal forms. They urged courts to shed narrow legalistic tendencies, embrace dynamic reasoning and recognise new interests across diverse fields of established law. They created environmental law courses in law schools across the country, with the first initiatives emerging in the late 1970s within Australia’s most radical law school: Macquarie. They founded their own associations and public interest law firms with the mandate of creating novel legal strategies to protect a non-human actor previously lacking legal rights — the environment. Their successors became stewards of these new organisations and were also appointed judges in planning and environment courts and tribunals, handing down rulings which recognised environmental interests to be equal, and even superior, to economic and other social concerns, including employment opportunities and native title interests in land. Drawing on this rich body of data, this paper outlines the central theories and preliminary findings of a study of three generations of environmental lawyers, critically examining their contributions to governance and social causes.