One of the modern world's most confounding contradictions is explored in a new book co-edited by University of Alberta Law professor Cameron Jefferies.
The book deals with the paradox of how "the forces of innovation, such as technological progress, have created new pressures on the Earth's environmental systems, yet innovation is required to ameliorate those same problems," says Jefferies, a researcher of international environmental law.
The book is a product of the sixth Four Societies meeting, which was held in July 2016, in Waterloo, Ont.
The Four Societies is an innovative initiative involving scholars, and others, from each of four international law societies -- Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and Japan.
Every two years, its workshops are hosted in one of its member countries, with the goal of bringing scholars of international law together. This initiative, which gives voice to both junior and senior scholars, has a history of producing edited collections around the theme explored at each conference.
The theme of the 2016 meeting was The Promise of International Law: Solutions for the World's Crises. That year's meeting was was hosted by the Canadian Council on International Law, together with the Centre for International Governance Innovation's International Law Research Program.
The book was jointly edited by CCIL members Neil Craik, Cameron Jefferies and Sara Seck, together with Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law's Tim Stephens.
Jefferies also participated, as a junior scholar, at the 2014 conference in Ottawa, and published a chapter in the book that resulted from that event (Experts, Networks and International Law), which was co-edited by UAlberta Law's Professor Joanna Harrington.