ICS Seminar Series - Elisabeth Chaves
Date: Thursday 30 July 2015
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EE.G.02, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus
Elisabeth Chaves
'Illegally' Protecting Communities from Corporate Harms: the Work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
Abstract
In recent years in the US, some communities have begun to assert 'rights' to protect themselves from corporate harms, such as unwanted land uses including fracking, factory farms, and pipelines. This 'community rights' movement is largely spearheaded by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a non-profit public interest law firm founded in 1995. The broader goal of CELDF is to assert democratic control directly over corporations. However, as CELDF acknowledges, the present systems of governance and law in the US make this goal, or the means to achieve it, largely 'illegal.' This paper traces the development of CELDF's strategy and its decision to move 'outside the system,' while still appearing to operate within it. The paper argues that the 'community rights' approach advocated by CELDF represents a new form of legal mobilisation, one that hews to a radical criticism of liberal environmental law. CELDF's approach resembles that put forth by green legal theorists, insofar as it requires not a mobilisation of the law to assert pre-existing rights but a reformation of the law and beyond. The aim is to create new rights that themselves call into question the liberal democratic structure of governance that prevails in the US.
Biography
Elisabeth Chaves is a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Vassar College. She has a PhD in Planning, Governance and Globalisation from the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, and a JD from the University of San Diego School of Law. Her book, Reviewing Political Criticism: Journals, Intellectuals and the State was published by Ashgate in 2015. Her current research examines the politics of land use conflicts.