Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Staff Library, Room 7.4.1.
ANU College of Law, Building 7 Fellows Road, Acton, ACT, 2601
Contact
Event description
In this talk, Professor Steven Vaughan of UCL Laws will talk about the role of lawyers in exacerbating climate change for their clients. A former environmental lawyer in private practice himself (working for BP and others), Steven will look at the rules that govern how lawyers should act (their conflicting duties to clients, to the public interest, to act with integrity etc) and will explore what theories of lawyers’ ethics tell us about the special place of lawyers in society. His main argument is that lawyers need to face into, and not shy away from, the hard moral questions about the work they do for their clients that has significant carbon impacts.
Speakers
Featured Speakers
Steven Vaughan is Vice Dean (Strategy) and Professor of Law and Professional Ethics at the Faculty of Laws, University College London. The author and editor of four books and dozens of peer-reviewed journal papers and other publications, he is a recognised world-leading scholar in two primary academic fields: environmental law (including on climate change, chemicals regulation, planning law, and contaminated land development); and the legal profession (writing on ethics, diversity, regulation, and legal education). Steven began his career in 2003 with a decade in the City, working as an environmental law solicitor in two elite global law firms, first at Freshfields and then at Latham & Watkins.