Recognized for Open Collaboration
From the nominator:
By leveraging the game-changing innovations of OERs, we are transforming Australian legal education and helping law graduates to be ‘climate conscious’. A team has brought together subject experts from across the country to create the pioneering open-access textbook, Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer. Read by thousands of students, and embraced by time-poor law teachers, this book disrupts the culture of learning resources (paywall by default) and opens new pathways in legal pedagogy.
As the world grapples with the escalating challenges of climate change, the legal profession finds itself at a crossroads. This pioneering open access book is designed to enable law students and teachers of professionally accredited law programs and legal professionals to strategically navigate current legal challenges – providing the know-how to positively influence critically needed law reform in a climate changed world.
This book presents learners with original and accessible analyses of the impacts of climate change on the legal doctrines and principles that are used in everyday legal practice and taught in every law school. It contains chapters written by leading subject experts and contain new case law and statutes, reflection questions, and further reading lists. The chapters, authored by 45 leading educators from 15 universities, as well as members of the legal profession, are published progressively over three tranches from 2024 to 2025, comprising 26 chapters in total, covering every core and many elective subjects taught in Australian universities.
I am very glad to have learned about this outstanding open education project! Climate change is one of the top issues that open education can address for impact, and this project is designed to create a pipeline of lawyers who have the mindset and knowledge to fight the ongoing crisis. I am especially excited by the breadth of coverage offered by this resource, in that it represents a wide variety of topics and perspectives, including Indigenous-authored materials. The authors’ commitment to make this a living document that can maintain its currency as the law and the climate change makes it especially valuable. Kudos!
Award Reviewer
This open-access e-textbook is clearly a novel and required resource helping Australian legal graduates to be more climate conscious. It is great to see so many authors from a variety of Australian universities contributing to this work. The open book design and functionality has been well used to realise the accessibility of this key resource.
Award Reviewer
It is noted that the ongoing development of the resource, with additional chapters added to address emerging needs is a great way of ensuring the currency of the work and maintaining interest and engagement with the resource. Incorporation of references and additional readings in each chapter as well as links to key words/phrases and concepts makes the work rich and user friendly.
Learn More
- Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Climate Change and the Australian Legal System (La Trobe University)
- Read online (CAUL OER Collective)
- Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Educators’ Companion (La Trobe University)
- Climate Conscious Lawyers (web site)
