Part I Context, Ch.8 Legal Imagination and Teaching

Subject(s):

International environmental law

This chapter argues that while dispelling wishful thinking is important in teaching and writing about international environmental law, it is equally important to foster legal imagination. It begins by considering three challenges in teaching international environmental law. These challenges include the lack of intellectual baselines among students, scholars, and teachers; the legal complexity of the subject; and the ‘hope’ that is often placed in international environmental law. Responding to the third of these challenges means that much of the focus in teaching in the field of international environmental law has been to dissuade wishful thinking. The chapter then shows how the focus on wishful thinking has overlooked the importance of legal imagination in international environmental law. It considers how an important aspect of fostering legal imagination is to ground it in legal reality.