“Early-Career Scholar Workshop on Environmental Law”, held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Saturday 29 April 2017

Report on the participation of Professors Ben Boer and Alexander Zahar

The workshop was organized by Associate Professor Benoit Mayer of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in consultation with the Research Insitute of Environmental Law (RIEL) at Wuhan University. The purpose of the workshop was to assist early-career scholars in environmental law to refine their written work in preparation for publication. Eight such scholars were competitively selected from a group of 45 applicants from around the world. The successful applicants were two PhD candidates from Australia; one practicing lawyer from Mumbai in India; an Indian PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London; an Assistant Professor at the Law School of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur; and three Chinese nationals: a lecturer at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing; a Research Associate at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada; and a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

The workshop ran from 9 am to 6 pm. The format was innovative. The young scholars were grouped into four pairs. There were four sessions, one for each pair. In each session, one young scholar presented the work of the other; this was followed by the comments of a discussant (Professors Boer and Zahar were discussants in some sessions and chairpersons in others); and lastly the session was opened up to general discussion in the form of comments addressed to the pair of scholars by those present. In this way, each of the early-career participants had their written work critically examined and the path to publication illuminated, not only by senior experts, but also by each other. The workshop contributes to the building of a culture of high-level scholarship in environmental law in the Asian region—and beyond. We believe that more such workshops should be held at regular intervals to continue the work of cultivating promising legal scholars and facilitating their engagement with environmental law.

We hope that such workshops will encourage high-quality submissions to the Chinese Journal of Environmental Law, published by Brill in collaboration with RIEL, as well as to Climate Law (which is another RIEL-based journal published by Brill) and other journals around the world. We anticipate that RIEL will be in a position to organize a similar workshop, in 2018.