3.1 Content: knowledge and skills for the Anthropocene

Concerns over content revolve around identification of what a law school should include in teaching the Anthropocene with respect to both the knowledge and skills that students are expected to learn for their degrees. The previous discussion on legal ethics highlighted the aspects of the knowledge issue as encompassing, either individually or in some combination, the substance of laws and legal issues; the practices required for advocacy; duties to the client, courts and legal system, and society and the political system; representation of the public interest independently of the state; and education of others regarding the law. ^{Footnote 69} The nature of the Anthropocene involves a connection to environmental science as a part of understanding the relationship between humanity and the natural world, and so implies a need to bridge the aforementioned aspects of knowledge in some measure to environmental science. Such a connection poses a number of implications for the identification of relevant knowledge regarding the Anthropocene. First, the coverage of laws and legal issues should include some attention to how both influence human interactions with the environment. Second, instruction on practices for effective advocacy should address advocacy not just on behalf of persons involved in legal disputes, but also on behalf of the environment. Third, as much as there may be duties to the client, courts and legal system, and larger society and political system, instruction should also review the scope of those duties, both in terms of the duties in assuring each a healthy environment as well as the duties to the environment itself. Fourth, there should be similar consideration regarding independence in representation, such that it locates the welfare of the environment vis-à-vis the public interest and the state. Last, the expectation of education requires a capacity to teach, and so incurs a need to convey information sufficient to allow students to teach others about the relationship between the law and the Anthropocene.

The discussion on legal ethics also highlights the question of skills to be taught to students, with a comparable slate of options that include problem-solving; neutrality when engaging clients; partisanship when advocating on behalf of clients; negotiation in dispute resolution; temperament reflecting a professional ideal; and teaching to clients and the public. ^{Footnote 70} With respect to problem-solving, the inherent presence of environmental science in understanding the Anthropocene raises the necessity of teaching both legal reasoning and scientific reasoning. In regard to neutrality, the concerns over human-environment relations in the notion of the Anthropocene suggests skills in identifying a neutral position that places the lawyer between the interests of the client and the interests of the environment. Further, for partisanship it calls for advocacy that serves a client before the court without harming the environment. It additionally suggests negotiation skills in resolving disputes without sacrificing the welfare of the environment. Similarly, the nature of the Anthropocene implies a temperament that is mindful of the environment in fulfilling the role of a legal professional. Finally, the skills of teaching support the expectation of knowledge for teaching, such that students should learn not only the information necessary to teach about the law and the Anthropocene, but also the relevant skills to teach that information to clients and the public.

As straightforward as the above may appear, however, there are underlying issues challenging their implementation: the conceptual core of the Anthropocene centres on the relationship between humanity and the environment, and so incurs a need to understand both. To the extent that the discourses of the Anthropocene require an understanding of the environment, they maintain an attendant need to connect to environmental science. As a result, attempts to integrate the Anthropocene into legal education require interdisciplinary teaching encompassing law and environmental science. The combination of law and environmental science together would be consistent with the calls for laws schools to provide more interdisciplinary education, ^{Footnote 71} but the demands generated by such disparate fields raises questions as to whether a given law school can host the necessary expertise across both law and environmental science. To a degree, it may be possible to seek relevant expertise outside the law school, but the prospects for outsourcing teaching would be determined by the context of the law school in a larger university or professional community with (1) available experts relevant for teaching the Anthropocene and (2) conditions supportive of interdisciplinary efforts to engage those experts.

Even if a law school is able to provide the necessary expertise across law and environmental science, there is an additional issue as to the expectations of scope in teaching the Anthropocene, in the sense that expectations for professional expertise in law and environmental science risk a conversion of legal education into a study of environmental law, if not environmental science, at the potential expense of other law subjects. In essence, it raises an issue regarding the goal of legal education in terms of what a graduating law student is expected to learn. The extent to which such a conversion arises is a function of the decisions made over the integration of Anthropocene-related knowledge and skills into a law school curriculum. The decisions can be construed as placing the disposition of a curriculum on a continuum between “thin” and “thick” approaches: “thin” approaches would restrict treatment of the Anthropocene, either to its appearance as a concern in laws and legal issues or its presence in future legal practice, whereas “thick” approaches would seek to offer a broader context, going beyond the significance of the Anthropocene for the creation or practice of law to further include academic and professional perspectives about the Anthropocene, differences in discourses over the Anthropocene across multiple disciplines, and the place of the law in larger holistic understanding of humanity and the environment.

Neither approach is immune to challenges. A thin approach would conceivably fit more readily within the existing capacities of a preponderance of law schools, but in narrowing consideration of the Anthropocene to ostensibly doctrinal confines, it threatens to (1) make it a topic with a perfunctory place amidst other subjects in a curriculum, thereby reducing its importance; and (2) prevent engagement with environmental science, thereby contradicting a fundamental component of the concept of the Anthropocene. A thick approach, in contrast, would provide a fuller education that would help students better understand the connection between the law and the Anthropocene, particularly with respect to the complexities of human-environment relations, but it would raise questions over the available capacity of a law school to provide the necessary expertise covering both law and environmental science.

3.2 Teaching tools: methods, materials, and assessments for the Anthropocene

In large part, the selection of teaching tools for the Anthropocene can draw upon the same slate of teaching methods, materials, and assessments exhibited by law schools in teaching legal ethics. The discussion of previous sections on legal ethics instruction yielded an array of teaching methods: lecture, textual reading of laws and rules, case-studies, problem-solving exercises, Socratic engagement, and contextual teaching linking multiple subjects within a given semester, and simulations of potential real-life scenarios. ^{Footnote 72} Additionally, there were methods that involved instructors outside the law school in terms of partnerships with law firms or legal organizations to provide practitioners with help to teach in the classroom, oral histories from practitioners reflecting on personal experiences, and experiential learning via placement in internships or clinics. ^{Footnote 73} Further, there was also a movement towards more interdisciplinary approaches that drew upon the teaching methods of non-law fields. ^{Footnote 74} Each of the aforementioned teaching methods incurred a corresponding adoption of materials for study and assessments of learning. ^{Footnote 75} To the extent that efforts to integrate the Anthropocene into legal education maintain instruction about law, law schools are still able to consider the array of choices in method, materials, and assessments applied in teaching other legal subjects.

It should be noted, however, that there are differences in the above options with respect to the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene’s association of humanity and the environment call for law schools to link the disparate fields of law and environmental science. This means an inclusion of environmental science, if not science in general, into each of the various choices considered for teaching the Anthropocene as a subject of law. This imposes a burden upon law faculty to acquire the capacities to address both law and environmental science within their methods, materials, and assessments. The exception lies within interdisciplinary approaches, which out of the above slate of options seem to offer the closest fit with the Anthropocene’s concerns for the relationship between humanity and the environment. Interdisciplinary approaches would help to alleviate the burdens upon law schools in terms of drawing upon instructors, materials, and assessments from other disciplines with expertise in teaching about the Anthropocene.

The idea of interdisciplinary approaches aligns with a larger movement for interdisciplinary legal education, but it raises potential issues associated in terms of the promotion of non-legal teaching methods. To the extent that teaching the Anthropocene might incorporate interdisciplinary discourses, it alters pre-existing conceptions of legal education by opening it to ideas and practices outside of law. In particular, integrating science into legal education implies some instruction about scientific analysis and its tensions with legal reasoning. As a result, the promotion of non-legal education incurs a transformation for law schools that may require an attendant change in the constitution of the faculty and students towards those more willing and able to engage with interdisciplinary approaches.

For an individual law school, the extent to which such a transformation occurs and the degree to which interdisciplinary approaches are adopted depend upon the preferences of the school for thin or thick strategies towards the Anthropocene. Because they narrow the expectations for what students should learn about the Anthropocene to more ostensibly legal aspects, thin approaches reduce the burden upon faculty to acquire capacities in disciplines outside law and thereby make it more feasible to avoid interdisciplinary choices. Thick approaches, because they seek a broad context in student understanding about the Anthropocene that extends to perspectives outside the law, pose a larger burden in teaching capacity that calls for a distribution of teaching across multiple disciplines.

3.3 Location of the Anthropocene in the curriculum

In contrast to considerations over teaching tools, there is no particular strategy more amenable over others for integrating the Anthropocene into a curriculum. The options reflected in law school experiences with legal ethics encompassed discrete courses wholly dedicated to a specific subject, pervasive approaches that raised a subject within multiple courses, integrated methods that made a subject a theme for multiple courses within a single semester, and experiential programmes that have students learning from practitioners in internships and clinics. ^{Footnote 76} Each of these encounters difficulties with respect to the Anthropocene. The use of discrete courses allows specialization by a fraction of law school faculty and foster ready identification of the Anthropocene as a topic worthy of a dedicated course, but it also isolates the Anthropocene as a subject from other components of the curriculum and thereby makes it difficult for students to comprehend the scale with which the issues of the Anthropocene can permeate the totality of law—a division that runs contrary to the concerns of the Anthropocene for understanding the comprehensive connections between human activity and environmental change. Pervasive and integrated approaches both help to promote student appreciation of the Anthropocene as a presence throughout the breadth of the law as a field, but also challenge a larger portion of the faculty to develop some expertise with the Anthropocene and to dedicate some effort in locating relevant elements within disparate courses. While this is consistent with desires of Anthropocene discourses to raise awareness of its issues, it poses a potential strain on law faculty capacities. Experiential programmes are also not immune from difficulty, since hopes of including the Anthropocene in internships and clinics require the identification of practitioners with professional expertise in issues involving human-environment relations. This is a narrow professional specialization that may not be readily accessible for all law schools.

To a degree, interdisciplinary approaches can mitigate the above challenges in terms of allowing potential access to resources outside of law schools that reduce the challenges of finding specialists, developing teaching capacity across multiple courses, or locating appropriate practitioners, in which case, the decision for interdisciplinary education, along with the underlying preferences for thin or thick conceptions of the Anthropocene in legal education, will influence the scale of difficulties a given law school will have to address in placing the Anthropocene within its curriculum.

3.4 Hierarchy for the Anthropocene

Last, the discussion on legal ethics instruction identified the issue of hierarchy in terms of perceptions about the status of a subject within a curriculum. The experiences of law schools with legal ethics indicated that students tend to disregard subjects perceived as holding lower importance relative to others. The factors influencing such perceptions include the designation of a course as compulsory or elective, its orientation towards early-year or later-year students, the allocation of credit towards completion of degree requirements, its prominence as a subject in the law school, the prominence of the faculty teaching it, its significance in gaining entrance to the legal profession, and its relevance in the course of professional practice. ^{Footnote 77} Aspirations for the Anthropocene generally suffer against these factors. With respect to the latter two, the conditions to enter the legal profession and the practices as a legal professional are generally outside the purview of law schools and instead fall under the control of professional organizations responsible for licensing, government entities and regulations overseeing the work of legal actors, and employers holding work requirements unique to their office practices. As a result, the salience of the Anthropocene is dependent upon entities outside the law school. As much as it may be growing concern for scholarly academic discourses, it is not clear that the Anthropocene has reached the same prevalence in practical settings outside of academia. As a result, to the extent that the Anthropocene is not a major concern for joining the legal profession or practising the law, the subject may offer little appeal for students intent on preparing for their careers.

With respect to the other factors, law schools have more influence in that they exercise direct control, but they must still contend with issues tied to degree requirements and capacity. Degree requirements delimit the courses that can be taken for graduation, creating a scarcity of space in a given law school curriculum such that decisions to make the Anthropocene compulsory, to allocate it more credits, or to make it a fundamental early-year subject invariably come at the expense of other course offerings. Capacity of the school as an institution and capacity of the faculty also create scarcity in terms of circumscribing the ability of particular law school to lift the Anthropocene as a prominent focus of attention, such that decisions to increase the status of the Anthropocene depend upon larger decisions to increase the proportional allocation of law school resources relative to other subjects.

Unlike the preceding considerations over content, teaching tools, and curriculum placement, possible inclinations between thin or thick approaches to the Anthropocene bear little guidance for law schools in resolving issues of hierarchy. The distinction between thin and thick approaches deals with the breadth of content and teaching tools within a course. Choices over content and teaching tools are disconnected from the status of a course as being compulsory, the number of credits given to it, or its placement as early-year or later-year. As a result, law schools should treat the issue of hierarchy as distinct from the thin vs. thick considerations related to content, teaching tools, and curriculum placement. Apart from the external influences of professional practice, the issue of hierarchy is more of a reflection regarding a given law school’s unique preferences in teaching, such that decisions over compulsory or elective status, early-year or later-year placement, allocation of credit, or prominence are ultimately dependent upon the commitment by the law school to the Anthropocene as a subject of emphasis in its teaching programme.

3.5 Ways forward

The above comments on the issues of content, teaching tools, curriculum placement, and hierarchy outlined the parameters of consideration for efforts seeking to integrate the Anthropocene into legal education. The discussion did not endeavour to issue a general set of recommendations, since law schools are not all entirely the same. Law schools, because they are professional programmes associated with practice, are not isolated units, but are rather instead institutions intertwined with external forces. Preceding discussion referenced the influence of professional requirements set by professional organizations, government policies, and employer expectations upon the orientation of a law school’s curriculum. There are, however, additional factors posed by larger surroundings in terms of political, economic, and sociocultural conditions. To the extent that law schools strive to produce graduates with knowledge and skills that are timely and useful for society, they must be responsive to their local context. As a result, a general set of recommendations risks becoming irrelevant for individual law schools. Instead, in order to provide insights with sufficient flexibility to address the diverse nuances of disparate contexts, the analysis worked instead to provide a framework to identify issues for consideration in decisions regarding the Anthropocene as a subject in legal education. By doing so, the analysis sought to inform decision-making while maintaining the freedom of law schools to make choices appropriate for their respective contexts.

4.1 Socio-cultural context

To begin, in some sense, sociocultural conditions in Asia as a region appear to be generally conducive for reforms in legal education. There is an ongoing regional push for a common model of universities facilitating compatible course offerings, comparable degree programmes, transferable credits, matching calendars, exchange of faculty and students, and collaboration in research and teaching. ^{Footnote 81} This is accompanied by a desire to meet global standards of higher education historically held by Western universities. ^{Footnote 82} With respect to law schools, there is a concurrent regional movement of reform involving a convergence towards instruction of common legal skills and legal principles. The convergence is driven by the rising prevalence of trade between Asian countries that has spurred an attendant growth in multinational legal regimes and transnational legal services, which together have encouraged a harmonization of legal practice across the jurisdictions in the region. ^{Footnote 83} In responding to such developments, law schools have enacted changes to transform themselves, with a general orientation towards American models that are perceived as representing predominate global standards for legal education. ^{Footnote 84}

Despite the general regional orientation of reform towards the adaptation of global ideas and practices, there continue to be difficulties with respect to wide inequalities in capacity among law schools and access to legal education among student populations. As a region, Asia covers an expanse of different countries at diverse stages of development hosting disparate education systems. A consequence of such variety is that law schools in some countries lack capacities in expertise or resources to carry out the reforms pursued by law schools in more advanced neighbouring countries. This creates an additional consequence for law students, in that it also means that not all law students in the various countries of the region enjoy access to the same quality of legal education. ^{Footnote 85} These conditions are not conducive to efforts to promoting understanding of the Anthropocene in law schools across the region. Pre-existing limitations in capacity, such as those prevalent in lesser-developed countries, challenge the extent to which law schools can promulgate the Anthropocene in their curricula. Restrictions in access impede propagation of understanding about the Anthropocene by narrowing the proportion of students able to receive instruction.

4.2 Economic context

Next, within Asia, there are patterns of linkages between economic development with education and environmental welfare. Within Asian states—particularly those in East Asia—education policies have been historically linked to development strategies to facilitate the production of workforces holding knowledge and skills relevant for industries promoted by national development programmes. ^{Footnote 86} The more modern turn towards sustainable development has exhibited relatively less state direction for education, but universities across the region have nonetheless worked to incorporate sustainability and its sensitivity towards environmental issues into their respective higher education curricula. ^{Footnote 87} The nascent character of national education policies on sustainability does not necessarily reflect a lack of state commitment, as a preponderance of Asian states are participating in international sustainable development mechanisms such as the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. ^{Footnote 88} Such trends are consistent with theories regarding the Kuznets Curve, which asserts that development trajectories follow a pattern in which early stages of economic growth incur environment degradation but later stages of prosperity encourage environmental conservation. ^{Footnote 89}

Similar to the issue of sociocultural context, however, there is widespread inconsistency in the progress of Asian states towards sustainable development. ^{Footnote 90} The divergence follows the arguments of the Kuznets Curve, with the various states of Asia lying at diverse stages of development that place them at different points of progress towards environmentally friendly economies. ^{Footnote 91} The implication is that, separately from expressions of commitment made by states, the implementation of policies and practices to address environmental issues such as those raised by the Anthropocene is also dependent upon their economic status. To the extent that law schools are components of national higher education systems, the resulting suggestion is that environmental concerns will be more compatible with state interests in states enjoying higher levels of economic prosperity. With respect to the Anthropocene, this means that in countries with lower levels of economic prosperity, law schools that proactively seek to integrate the Anthropocene into legal education are at risk of diverging from state development policies and inciting a subsequent hostile state response.

4.3 Political context

Last, the dangers of hostile state action are heightened by the political context of Asian states. Indicators maintained by multiple non-governmental organizations (NGOs) note the continuing struggles of Asian states in observing human rights, especially with respect to liberal ideals such as free expression, free thought, free assembly, and free travel. ^{Footnote 92} The issues are exemplified by the ongoing disappearances of activists in cases involving human rights and indigenous rights connected with environmental problems. ^{Footnote 93} Such political conditions are disconcerting for efforts to introduce the Anthropocene, since the discourses of the Anthropocene are predicated upon critical analysis involving open debate, access to information, and engagement with environmentally harmful aspects of existing human civilization. In essence, efforts to promote concerns over the Anthropocene pose a challenge to the status quo, and thereby threaten the interests of dominant political forces whose status is associated with the status quo. As a result, there is a risk that such forces will protect their interests by inciting state responses inimical to discourses regarding the Anthropocene. For law schools, the tensions require a balance between efforts that adhere to the analytical requirements of Anthropocene-related discourses vs. compliance with state authority. The difficulties are compounded for situations in which law schools are encompassed within national higher education systems that are linked to state development policies, which render law schools and legal education as instruments of the state. Thus, the political conditions in Asia provide a cause for caution with respect to potential law school initiatives to incorporate the Anthropocene into legal education.

4.4 Potential supportive strategies

While the various sociocultural, economic, and political circumstances across states in Asia call upon law schools to give particular consideration to the challenges posed by their surrounding contexts, there are strategies available to help them advance the issue of the Anthropocene. On a regional basis, for example, there are existing models of transnational university collaborations enabling sharing and exchange of resources, which already include environmentally focused projects for Asian law schools such as those hosted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature through its Academy of Environmental Law (IUCN AEL). ^{Footnote 94} Outside the region, it is also possible to seek the assistance of international mechanisms, with environmentally relevant examples in cases involving local communities with environmental grievances who bypassed state resistance via cross-issue linkages that allowed them to access international institutions and foreign support. ^{Footnote 95} Such transnational approaches for activism are not necessarily dispositive in ensuring the promotion of the Anthropocene within any given law school, but they do offer means of support to inform and enable their efforts to do so.