FULL VIDEO OF THE LAUNCH WITH SHIBANI GHOSH, SHYAM DIVAN, PHILIPPE CULLET, AND BAHAR DUTT
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Watch the full video (above) of the launch and discussion on ‘Indian Environmental Law: Key Concepts and Principles’. Shibani Ghosh, the editor and a Fellow at CPR, introduced the book, followed by a discussion between Shyam Divan (Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India) and Philippe Cullet (Professor, SOAS, University of London), which was moderated by Bahar Dutt (Senior environmental journalist).
The question and answer session with the panel can be accessed here.
About the Book
For more than three decades now, the Indian courts have delivered far-reaching judgments on a range of significant environmental matters. In their effort to adjudicate complex disputes with serious environmental repercussions, the courts have developed a framework of environmental rights and legal principles. Indian Environmental Law: Key Concepts and Principles provides a critical analysis of this environmental legal framework. It studies the origins of environmental rights, substantive and procedural, and the four most significant legal principles – principle of sustainable development, polluter pays principle, precautionary principle and the public trust doctrine – and elaborates how Indian courts have defined, interpreted and applied them across a range of contexts.
As litigation and legal adjudication struggle to respond to worsening environmental quality, conceptual clarity about the content, application and limitations of environmental rights and legal principles is crucial for the improvement of environmental governance. With chapters written by Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, Lovleen Bhullar, Shibani Ghosh, Dhvani Mehta, and Lavanya Rajamani, this book explores the judicial reasoning and underlying assumptions in landmark judgments of the Supreme Court, the High Courts and the National Green Tribunal, and aims to provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the framework of rights and principles.
To read more about each chapter in this edited volume, click here.
About the Editor
Shibani Ghosh is a Fellow at the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment at the Centre for Policy Research, where her research and writing focuses on environmental law and governance. She is an Advocate-on-Record at the Supreme Court of India, and practices before the Supreme Court and the National Green Tribunal.
About the Panellists
Shyam Divan is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India. His areas of practice cover most branches of civil litigation including banking, securities law, arbitration, administrative law and environmental law. He has appeared for citizens’ groups in a host of civil liberties and constitutional cases. Mr Divan has co-authored Environmental Law and Policy in India (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2001), one of the leading texts on Indian environmental law.
Philippe Cullet is Professor of international and environmental law at SOAS University of London and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He works on international and domestic environmental law, natural resources, water and sanitation and socio-economic rights and engages regularly with policymakers at the national and international levels. His latest edited books are Right to Sanitation in India – Critical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2019 – co-editors S Koonan & L Bhullar) and Groundwater and Climate Change: Multi-Level Law and Policy Perspectives (Routledge, 2019 – co-editor R M Stephan).
Bahar Dutt is a conservation biologist and environmental journalist, and the winner of over twelve national and international awards including the Ramnath Goenka Award for excellence in environmental reporting. She was previously the Environment Editor at CNN-IBN and a columnist for the Mint. She is the author of Green Wars: Dispatches from a Vanishing World (Harper-Collins, 2014) and the founder of the MITTI Project.
