News & Announcements
July 30, 2025
Virtual Working Group: Environment, History and Law Global Workshop Series (reading and writing group)
We are delighted to invite members of the ASLH community to attend the Environment, History and Law Global online workshop series. The triangle ‘environment – history – law’ suggests a wealth of opportunities for productive transdisciplinary scholarship: Historical analysis of environmental law, environmental histories of legal change, legal histories of the environment, etc. The workshop:
- supports and strengthens the work of scholars working at the nexus of environment, law, and history;
- exposes legal and environmental historians to the potential benefits of cross-fertilization between their fields;
- introduces group members to a range of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies to enhance their work;
- helps scholars identify collaborators for future projects; and
- grows and encourages the development of the field.
Timing: Building on the rich papers shared with our community in 2024/2025, we will continue to run workshops approximately every 6 weeks, with a short hiatus from June to August. The workshops will be held online at different times to accommodate a range of time zones.
Format: At the workshop we will discuss pre-circulated draft papers. An expert in the area is invited to begin the discussion, followed by general comments and questions from all participants. The paper will not be distributed beyond the members of the group in attendance. Each workshop is 1 hour in length.
Participating in the Workshop: Membership in the group is open to scholars from all backgrounds and locations interested in the intersections between environment, history and law. Please contact either Dr David Schorr or Dr Susan Bartie to join our mailing list and receive zoom links and draft papers.
Submission Process for Papers: If you would like to present a paper in 2026, please email either Dr David Schorr or Dr Susan Bartie with a paragraph summary of your proposed draft paper and an indication of when (i.e. what months) you would be available to present. While we welcome proposals at any time, we encourage you to submit soon for places in the 2026 series.
Workshop Coordinator Bios:
Dr Susan Bartie is a legal historian at the Australian National University. She is a Senior Lecturer and Discovery Early Research Australian Research Council Fellow. Her current historical study of 50 years of Australian environmental lawyering (1970-2020) aims to develop and preserve an unprecedented data set of environmental lawyers over multiple generations. It is designed to create important new knowledge, challenging the common and limited treatment of lawyers as mere instruments of social causes and revealing a novel, and previously unexplored, layer of environmental governance. She is a member of the ASLH. Email: susan.bartie@anu.edu.au
Dr David Schorr is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Law of Tel Aviv University, where he teaches torts, environmental law, and legal history. He is a long-time member of the ASLH, and has organized panels on legal history and the environment at ASLH and other international conferences. His book, The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier (Yale University Press, 2012) as well as several subsequent publications (including the chapter “Historical Analysis in Environmental Law” in the Oxford Handbook of Legal History) have also explored the intersection of these fields. Email: dschorr@tauex.tau.ac.il