First Annual Green Rights and Warrior Lawyers Virtual Academy and Inspirathon

Stepan Wood is the Canada Research Chair in Law, Society and Sustainability and Director of the Centre for Law & the Environment at the Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. Stepan’s research relates to corporate social responsibility, sustainability, globalization, & transnational governance. He has an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School. He practiced law with White & Case in New York.

A citizen of, and General Counsel, to the Haida Nation, Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson has practised in Indigenous-environmental law since 1995 when she began representing the Haida Nation at all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada. She was lead counsel in litigation to protect the old growth forests of Haida Gwaii in the Haidacase, the leading case on consultation and accommodation of Indigenous rights. She is counsel for the Haida Nation’s aboriginal title case and related reconciliation negotiations—which have resulted in innovative agreements with British Columbia and Canada—as well as other litigation including successfully challenging the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, and injunctive relief for herring.Terri-Lynn is an Honourary Director of Ecojustice, serves on the Law Society of British Columbia Truth and Reconciliation Advisory Committee, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s Indigenous Advisory Council, the Dean’s Advisory Committee for the Centre for Business Law at Allard School of Law, and she is Co-Chair of the Indigenous Engagement in Regulatory Matters Task Force. She is a co-principal investigator with the Canada Climate Law Initiative. Terri-Lynn has been honoured with thePeoples’ Choice Andrew Thompson Award for lifetime contributions to environmental protection and sustainability (2014); the Courage in Law Award from the Indigenous Law Students Association at Allard Law School (2018); Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in the category of “Changemakers” (2020); Maclean’s “Power List”, ranking 21 of 50 Canadians who are breaking ground in their field (2021); and recognized as one of 500 most influential business leaders in BC in the General Counsel category (2022). In 2021 she was appointed as Queen’s Counsel. Terri-Lynn is also a multi-award-winning performer, an artist, dancer, and author (seewww.ravencallingproductions.ca).

Calvin Sandborn | University of Victoria Faculty of Law

Calvin Sandborn has practiced environmental law for over 25 years as counsel for West Coast Environmental Law Association, the Farmworkers Legal Services Project and the Forest Practices Board of British Columbia. He has extensive experience in both environmental litigation and successful lobbying for environmental reform. He was an associate to Commissioner Stephen Owen during the historic Commission on Resources and Environment process.

Professor Sandborn is the legal director of the Environmental Law Centre and teaches Law 353 (Environmental Law Centre Clinic). In 2011, he was named an Honourary Citizen of the City of Victoria, and awarded the Andrew Thompson Award by West Coast Environmental Law – the province’s top award for Environmental Advocacy. In 2016, he received the Victoria Bar Association “Contribution to the Law Award”, and in 2017 he received the “Svitlana Kravchenko Environmental Rights Award” at the international Public Interest Environmental Law Conference.

In 2018 he was appointed Queen's Counsel.

Justice Preston is the Chief Judge of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales. Prior to being appointed in November 2005, he was a senior counsel practising primarily in New South Wales in environmental, planning, administrative and property law. He has lectured in post-graduate environmental law for over 30 years. He is the author of Australia’s first book on environmental litigation and 144 articles, book chapters and reviews on environmental law, administrative and criminal law. He holds numerous editorial positions in environmental law publications and has been involved in a number of international environmental consultancies and capacity-building programs, including for judiciaries throughout Asia, Africa and the European Union.

Justice Preston is an Official Member of the Judicial Commission of NSW, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW and Honorary Fellow of the Environment Institute of the Australia and New Zealand. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by Macquarie University in 2018. He is a member of various international environmental law committees and advisory boards, he serves on the Governing Council and as Vice President for Oceania of the Global Judicial Institute on the Environment and Chair of the Environmental Law Committee of the Law Association for Asia and the Pacific (LAWASIA). Justice Preston is currently a Visiting Professor at Durham University (UK), an Adjunct Professor at three Australian universities, the University of Sydney, Western Sydney University and Southern Cross University and former Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College and Magdalen College at Oxford University (UK).

Sharon Mascher | University of Calgary Faculty of Law

Sharon joined the Faculty of Law in 2012. Prior to joining the Faculty of Law, Sharon was a Professor at Thompson Rivers University's Faculty of Law and an Associate Professor and the Deputy Director (Environment and Climate Change) of the Centre for Mining, Energy and Resources Law at the University of Western Australia's Faculty of Law. She has also held academic positions in the Faculties of Law at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and the University of Saskatchewan.

Sharon was co-editor of the Journal of Environmental Law and Practice from 2012-2020. She is currently a review editor for Frontiers in Climate, Climate Law and Policy and a Climate Governance Experts with the Canadian Climate Law Initiative. While in Australia, Sharon was a member of the Management Committee of the Environmental Defender's Office (Western Australia), a not-for-profit community legal clinic dedicated to protecting the environment. She also served as a principal policy officer for the Greenhouse Unit in Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation, a legal consultant to the Western Australian Department of Water and a member of the Western Australian Water and Rivers Commission Legislative Compliance Advisory Group.

Mumta Ito is founder of the NGO Nature’s Rights, UN Harmony with Nature Expert and initiator of a European Citizens Initiative to put Nature’s rights and earth centred governance on the EU legislative agenda. A former top ranking lawyer in the City of London, she advised governments, multinational corporations and investment banks. As co-founder of the Virgin Islands Environmental Council, she successfully saved a marine ecosystem of global ecological importance through community organising, bringing a landmark court case and creating legislative change. 

Stepan Wood | University of British Columbia Allard School of Law

Stepan  is the Canada Research Chair in Law, Society and Sustainability and Director of the Centre for Law & the Environment at the Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. Stepan’s research relates to corporate social responsibility, sustainability, globalization, & transnational governance. He has an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School. He practiced law with White & Case in New York.

Marjan Minnesma studied business administration, philosophy, and (international) law. She has been campaign director for Greenpeace Netherlands and worked for ten years in academia (VU and Erasmus University). Together with co-director and professor Rotmans at the Institute for Transitions (DRIFT), she founded Urgenda, an organization for innovation and sustainability, to make the required transitions happen. Urgenda worked as a front runner on solutions, from organizing the first collective buying initiative for solar panels to the introduction in the Netherlands of the first electric car produced in series. In order to further speed up transition processes, she brought the government to court together with almost 900 citizens to demand more action and won twice.

Marjan has been named the most influential person working in the field of sustainability in the Netherlands several years in a row. In 2015 she was declared to be a ‘leading global thinker’ by the authoritative American magazine Foreign Policy. She is the chair of om|nieuwe energie, the umbrella organisation of 40 local sustainable energy cooperatives.

Avi Lewis | University of British Columbia Department of Geography & Centre for Climate Justice

Avi is a documentary filmmaker and educator, with more than 30 years of experience in journalism and storytelling from the front lines of social movements.

In 2015, he was a co-author of The Leap Manifesto; fifteen political demands to get Canada off fossil fuels in a way that simultaneously confronts racial and gender discrimination and economic inequality. 

More recently, he has been deeply involved in the emergent frame of the Green New Deal – working with The Sunrise Movement in the US, and producing the animated short films Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Message from the Future II: The Years of Repair, written with Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi. 

Prior to joining UBC, he was a lecturer at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, where he designed a course that unpacks the impact of feature length documentaries. 

Tony Oposa is one of Asia’s most influential and unconventional environmental “warrior lawyers.” His passion, dedication and creative use of law underlie several momentous cases in the Philippines.

In 1990, Oposa pursued his first landmark case, Minors Oposa v Factoran, where he sued the government on behalf of current and future generations to oppose environmentally destructive logging practices. When he brought this case to court, the Philippine government had granted 92 logging companies permits to cut down 3.89 million hectares of old-growth forest when only 850,000 hectares remained, and forests were being logged at a rate of 200,000 hectares per year. This case established the “Oposa Doctrine,” which grants current generations legal standing to bring actions on behalf of future generations with respect to environmental rights.

Oposa’s other landmark cases have led to the court ordered clean-up of the severe pollution in Manila Bay, targeted illegal dynamite and cyanide fishing near delicate reefs in the Visayan Sea and stopped resorts from privatizing beaches through the construction of illegal structures.

He is also the founder of the School of the SEA (Sea and Earth Advocates; now known as SEA Camp) and the author of numerous works on law and nature.

Lynda M. Collins | University of Ottawa Faculty of Law

Lynda Collins is a Full Professor in the Centre for Environmental Law & Global Sustainability at the University of Ottawa Faculty Law. Professor Collins is an expert in environmental human rights at the domestic and international levels including constitutional environmental rights, Indigenous environmental rights, rights of nature, and environmental rights in private law. She is the author of The Ecological Constitution.

Professor Collins has advised multiple national and international organizations including the United Nations Association in Canada, the European Parliament, and Friends of the Earth. She has similarly participated in expert gatherings and participatory processes with the United Nations Human Rights Council, the United Nations Environment Program, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment.  She co-Chaired Ontario’s Toxic Reduction Scientific Expert Panel by Ministerial appointment. Along with Heather McLeod-Kilmurray, is co-author of The Canadian Law of Toxic Torts.  

Professor Collins has a secondary research interest in law student/lawyer wellness and the law and policy of subjective wellbeing; she teaches uOttawa’s course in Happiness and the Law. Professor Collins is a member of the bars of Ontario and California. 

Steven Donziger is a renowned advocate, writer, and public speaker at Donziger Law, with a focus on addressing human rights abuses and corporate malfeasance. He is part of the team working with Indigenous and farmer communities in an area of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest suffering from high cancer rates and other health ailments related to the massive oil pollution caused by Texaco, now owned by Chevron. In 2011, the affected communities won a historic $9.5 billon judgment against Chevron for the environmental cleanup of what experts consider to be one of the worst oil-related catastrophes in the world. Known for his “Herculean tenacity” (Business Week), Steven has represented the affected communities since first visiting the region in 1993.

Jason MacLean | University of New Brunswick Faculty of Law

Jason received his joint BCL/LLB from McGill in 2006 before clerking at the Supreme Court of Canada for Madame Justice Marie Deschamps. He is currently completing his PhD dissertation, Essays on the Law and Politics of Canada’s Climate Policy, at the University of Alberta.

Jason is a staunch supporter of the fight to stop climate change. He is passionate about environmental protection and promoting sustainability. Much of his research focuses on environmental law, natural resources law, climate change and energy policy, and sustainability pathways and co-benefits.

Before joining the UNB, he served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, and as an associate member of the School of Environment and Sustainability. He taught courses in Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental Law, International Environmental Law, Natural Resources Law, Property and Contracts.

Prior to entering academia, Jason practised corporate and commercial litigation at Osler, Hoskin, & Harcourt LLP in Toronto, and international commercial arbitration at Shearman & Sterling LLP in New York and Paris.

Cormac started his legal career in maritime and international commercial law with Shepstone and Wylie and Maitland and Co before specialising in environmental law and governance in 1994 when he established EnAct International in London. Today few lawyers can rival the depth and breadth of the environmental law and governance expertise which Cormac has acquired in working in more than 20 countries over two decades. This includes: designing the “architecture” of public and private sector governance systems that promote sustainability, drafting contracts and legal instruments (ranging from international treaties and declarations to national, provincial and municipal legislation) litigating, advising businesses and social entrepreneurs on greening their enterprises, and developing legal compliance systems.

He is also an internationally respected author, speaker and advocate for ecological sustainability. In 2008 he was included in a book profiling 301 extraordinary environmentalists in history and in 2012 he was won the Nick Steele award for the South African environmentalist of the year.

Cormac loves wild places and creatures and spends a lot of time thinking about how to build socially just and ecologically sustainable communities within industrialised civilisations. His work in pioneering a legal philosophy that restores an ecological perspective to governance systems (Earth jurisprudence) is internationally recognised. He has addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations and many other international conferences, and led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.

Kirby Maniá | University of British Columbia School of Journalism, Writing, and Media

Kirby Manià earned a PhD in English from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) and holds a Master of Arts in Modern Literature and Culture from the University of York (United Kingdom). She has taught courses in the environment, literary studies, and academic writing at universities in South Africa and Canada. Her research focuses on the crossover between urban spaces, literature, and the environment. She is particularly interested in post-apartheid/post-transitional South African literature(s), urban ecology, environmental justice, crime writing, postcolonial ecocriticism, and writing pedagogy. Recent examples of her scholarly work can be found in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Safundi, and English Studies in Africa.

Chima Williams joined the Nigerian environmental movement in the 1990s as a student volunteer for Environmental Rights Action (ERA), an NGO founded in 1993 that advocates for environmental rights in Nigeria. In 1998, Chima founded the Students Environmental Assembly Nigeria, the first-ever student-run environmental justice group in the country. Now the executive director of ERA (ERA/Friends of the Earth Nigeria), he serves as an environmental lawyer prosecuting transnational corporations on environmental pollution cases in Nigeria.  

Sara Seck | Dalhousie University Schulich School of Law ​​​​

Sarah is originally from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and has a pre-law professional background in music. She studied law in Ontario where she articled with a Bay Street business law firm. After completing a PhD in law at Osgoode Hall Law School, she joined Western University in 2007, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. She joined the Schulich School of Law in July 2017 where she is a member of MELAW and the Business Law faculty.

She is particularly interested in the relationship between international human rights law, environment, and business law, with a focus on the rights of local and Indigenous communities, and global south perspectives on sustainable development. She has researched and published extensively on home stateduties and business responsibilities in the extractive industries context. More recently, she considers how lessons from this research as well as insights from feminist and relational theorists might inform approaches to environmental and climate justice.

Jacinta Ruru (Raukawa, Ngāti Ranginui) MNZM, FRSNZ is a Distinguished Professor of law at the University of Otago. She researches Indigenous peoples’ legal rights and responsibilities to care for, own, manage and govern lands and waters, te Tiriti o Waitangi and reconciliation, and state law recognition of Māori laws. Her work includes co-authoring Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford University Press, 2010) and co-editing Ngā Kete Mātauranga. Māori Scholars at the Research Interface (Otago University Press, 2021). Jacinta is the recipient of a number of awards for her research, supervision and teaching.  

Robert Clifford, YELKATŦE | University of British Columbia Allard School of Law

Robert is WSÁNEĆ and a member of the Tsawout First Nation, his home community; he carries the name YELKATŦE, which was passed to him by his late grandfather, Earl Claxton Sr.  His PhD research uses community participation methodologies to explore the ways WSÁNEĆ laws are generated by and reflect the values, philosophies, lands, and worldviews of the WSÁNEĆ people. The research is equally important in terms of practical application for the WSÁNEĆ community and as a contribution to theoretical understandings of what it means to responsibly engage WSÁNEĆ law, and Indigenous law more generally, within complex contemporary power structures and dynamics.

Robert is actively involved in the academic and broader community. He has presented his work widely across academic and professional settings, speaking at community events as well. His publications cover a range of aspects relating to Indigenous law and Indigenous legal theory, including on legal pluralism, Indigenous language revitalization, and Indigenous spirituality. He has also taught in the JD program at the University of Victoria, most recently a field course in WSÁNEĆ law. At Allard Law, he will be teaching Law 358: Topics in First Nations Law (Indigenous Law and Climate Change), Law 291: Aboriginal & Treaty Rights, as well as a semester long intensive land and community-based field course in W̱SÁNEĆ law.