Faculty Colloquium: Jocelyn Stacey - Disaster as a Legal Concept

Disaster as a Legal Concept

Is “disaster” a legal concept? Legal sources from within Canada and around the world provide conflicting answers to this question. In some instances, the concept and experience of disaster is treated as legally irrelevant. In others, disaster is defined with a level of precision that defies decades of disaster research highlighting the contextual and contested nature of disasters. This presentation makes the case that disaster must be analysed as a legal concept. 

Disaster is everywhere in law – often combined with significant legal effects – though, as a concept, it is mostly overlooked or oversimplified. By drawing together an analysis of Canadian legal sources with disaster law from international law and comparator countries around the world, Professor Stacey argues that law creates a kaleidoscope of disaster, consisting of variable and shifting meanings and legal effects. Understanding disaster as a kaleidoscope, rather than individual fragments, reveals disaster’s distinctive, untapped legal potential: Disaster demands a contextual legal analysis, one that attends to the particularities of the people and places affected.

Speaker

Jocelyn Stacey is Associate Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. She researches environmental crises and the visible and invisible ways in which law creates, regulates and prevents these events. Her work focuses on environmental assessment law, disaster law, climate change, emergency powers and the rule of law. 

Professor Stacey works closely with First Nations on legal issues related to disasters, emergency powers and Indigenous jurisdiction. She is President of the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation, a non-profit society dedicated to training law students and young lawyers in public interest environmental law litigation. She served on the Research Council for the Public Order Emergency Commission (2022-2023), which inquired into the first invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act. Fasken Martineau Classroom, Room 122