Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise
Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise

Author: Carolyn Abbot

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1787358585

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Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise explores the use and understanding of law and legal expertise by environmental groups. Rather than the usual focus on the court room, it scrutinises environmental NGO advocacy during the extraordinarily dramatic Brexit process, from the referendum on leaving the EU in June 2016 to the debate around the new Environment Bill in the first half of 2020. There is generally a weak understanding of both the complexity and the potential of legal expertise in the environmental NGO community. Legal expertise can be more than a tool for campaigners, and more than litigation: it provides distinctive ways of both seeing the world and changing the world. The available legal resource in the sector is not just a practical limit on what can be done, but spills into the very understanding of what should be done, and what resource is needed. Mutually reinforcing links between capacity, understanding, culture and investment affect legal expertise across the board. There are, however, pockets of sophisticated legal expertise in the community, and legal expertise was heavily and often effectively used in the anomalously law-heavy Brexit-environment debate. The ability to call on thinly spread legal expertise in a crisis was in part due to effective NGO collaboration around Brexit-environment.

The Cabinet Manual
The Cabinet Manual

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Lords: Select Committee on the Constitution

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2011-03-07

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13: 9780108473142

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The draft Cabinet Manual was published by the Cabinet Office on 14 December 2010. Its development was first announced in February 2010, when, in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, stated that he had asked the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, "to lead work to consolidate the existing unwritten, piecemeal conventions that govern much of the way central government operates under our existing constitution into a single written document." The concept of a Cabinet Manual appears to have drawn extensively upon experience in New Zealand. The full draft of the Manual (incorporating a revised version of the chapter on elections and government formation) was published with the agreement of the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, and after its text had been approved by the Cabinet following consideration by the relevant Cabinet sub-committee and was made subject to public consultation. The Cabinet Secretary has stated that he expects to invite Cabinet to endorse a revised version of the Cabinet Manual in the spring of 2011. This report forms the Select Committee on the Constitution's response to the consultation. It is also intended to inform Members of the House about the issues which arise from the Manual's publication.