From Volume 11 (2022) the TEL Best Article Prize is awarded annually to the most innovative and thought-provoking contribution published in TEL that year. The selection of winning papers is made by an annually rotating panel of TEL Advisory Board members, based on a selection of papers from each issue nominated by the TEL Editorial Board, to which the selection panel can add up to three ‘wildcards’ for papers they deem worthy of the prize but that were not previously shortlisted by the Editors. The author(s) of the winning article receives an award of £250 in Cambridge University Press books and the two honourable mentions each receive £50 in books. All three are given permanent access to the full journal online archive.
TEL Best Article Prize 2023
Winner: Alexander Zahar
Agricultural Exceptionalism in the Climate Change Treaties (Volume 12, Issue 1)
The judges motivated their decision by noting that "this thought-provoking article offers an innovative shift of focus in global climate law and governance discourse onto the oft-neglected agricultural sector and the climate harms this sector causes. Exceptionally well-researched and supported by a systematic and comprehensively detailed analysis, it reveals the qualifications in climate change treaties that appear to exempt the agricultural sector from its mitigation obligations. This contribution is both highly innovative in terms of its focus and its results."
Bio: Alexander Zahar is Professor of International Law at Southwest University of Political Science and Law, in Chongqing, China, and a member of the China-ASEAN Legal Research Center, also in Chongqing. Alexander has taught at several law schools in Australia and China. He was for seven years a judicial advisor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha and at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Alexander is a Lead Reviewer of greenhouse gas inventories, national communications, and biennial reports, as well as a Technical Expert of biennial update reports submitted by developing countries. He is the founder and editor of the journal Climate Law. His publications include Debating Climate Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which he co-edited with Benoit Mayer. Presently, he is working on an edited book with Leonie Reins on Climate Technology and Law in the Anthropocene (Bristol University Press, forthcoming 2025). He is also researching climate change mitigation law with a focus on agriculture in China and Indonesia and in other countries in Southeast Asia.
Honourable Mention
David Jefferson, Elizabeth Macpherson and Steven Moe, Experiments with the Extension of Legal Personality to Ecosystems and Beyond-Human Organisms: Challenges and Opportunities for Company Law, (Volume 12, Issue 2)
The judges awarded this article the first honourable mention because ‘it exemplifies creativity in legal research and thinking. It extends existing legal scholarship by contemplating the significance of evolving concepts of legal personhood for nature for companies. In so doing, it puts new questions on the table and raises the challenges of reconciling tensions between legal concepts that are simultaneously developing in distinct fields. Methodologically, the article makes innovative use of a thought experiment. It will hopefully encourage future cross-fertilization between environmental law and company law scholarship."
Bio: David Jefferson is a Senior Lecturer Above the Bar at the University of Canterbury School of Law (Aotearoa New Zealand), where he teaches Environmental Law, Land Law, and Intellectual Property. David is a legal anthropologist whose research covers a range of issues related to biodiversity conservation, biotechnology regulation, intellectual property in the agricultural and food sectors, ecosystem rights laws, and the protection of Indigenous knowledge systems. The field sites where David works are in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the Andean Community of South America. He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Queensland, a JD from the University of California, Davis, and an MA in Psychology from Suffolk University. David has been the recipient of several competitive research awards, including a United States Fulbright fellowship for work in Ecuador. His first book, Towards an Ecological Intellectual Property: Reconfiguring Relationships Between People and Plants in Ecuador was published by Routledge in 2020. When he isn’t reading, writing, or teaching, David can be found going on family adventures around Aotearoa, particularly those that involve climbing rocks.
Bio: Elizabeth Macpherson is Pākehā (A New Zealander of European-settler descent) and is a Professor of Law and Rutherford Discovery Fellow at the University of Canterbury (Aotearoa New Zealand). Her research interests are in comparative environmental, natural resources, and constitutional law. She has led numerous grants and published widely on water and marine law and policy, Indigenous rights and climate change in Australasia and the Americas. She is the author of the award-winning book Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation: Lessons from Comparative Experience (2019, Cambridge University Press). She leads a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship programme, funded by Te Apārangi The Royal Society, on Blue Carbon Futures in Aotearoa New Zealand: Law, Climate, Resilience.
Bio: Steven Moe is a practising lawyer who is qualified in Aotearoa New Zealand, England & Wales and in Australia. He first began working as a lawyer in 2001 and has since practised for more than three years in each of London, Tokyo, Wellington, Sydney and Christchurch. He is the host of Seeds Podcast which has 380 conversations with inspiring people and has written books on the future of legal structures such as “Social Enterprise in New Zealand: A Legal Handbook”. He was on the first international board of the Global Alliance of Impact Lawyers and served as the chair for the APAC region. He is an Edmund Hillary Fellow and a partner at Parry Field Lawyers in Christchurch where he leads the Impact Team, supporting many purpose led organisations across the country, including some who are experimenting with legal structures that involve beyond human organisms. He recently published “The Apple Tree”, a picture book for children which is really for adults.
Honourable Mention
J. Michael Angstadt, Can Domestic Environmental Courts Implement International Environmental Law? A Framework for Institutional Analysis, (Volume 12, Issue 2)
The second honourable mention was awarded because the judges found "this article stands out for its ambition to add a framework within which the contributions of domestic courts to implementing international environmental law might be better understood. The author tackles the challenging task of framework enunciation with both nuance and sophistication. This article contributes early theory-building that can pave the way for future interdisciplinary work elucidating how domestic law institutions both shape and are shaped by international environmental law."
Bio: J. Michael (“Mike”) Angstadt teaches environmental law and policy as assistant professor at Colorado College (US). With training in environmental law (JD, Pace Law) and global environmental politics (PhD, Colorado State University), Mike explores questions at the nexus of the two, including (1) how domestic courts and judges shape international environmental law and (2) how environmental law institutions and approaches might be situated in more systemic context. He is a research fellow with the Earth System Governance Project and a member of the IUCN’s World Commission on Environmental Law. Alongside work, Mike enjoys gardening, exploring Colorado’s outdoors with his family, and jazz music.
Other 2023 Shortlisted Articles
- Violetta Ritz, Towards a Methodology for Specifying States' Mitigation Obligations in Line with the Equity Principle and Best Available Science (Volume 12, Issue 1)
- Eva van der Zee, Strengthening Environmental Decision Making through Legislation: Insights from Cognitive Science and Behavioural Economics (Volume 12, Issue 2)
- Ying Xia and Yueduan Wang, An Unlikely Duet: Public-Private Interaction in China's Environmental Public Interest Litigation (Volume 12, Issue 2)
- Suzanne Kingston, Edwin Alblas, Micheál Callaghan and Julie Foulon, Empowering Through Law: Environmental NGOs as Regulatory Intermediaries in EU Nature Governance (Volume 12, Issue 3)
- Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh,The Rising Tide of Rights: Addressing Climate Loss and Damage through Rights-Based Litigation (Volume 12, Issue 3)
2023 Selection Panel
Natasha Affolder and Louis Kotzé
TEL Best Article Prize 2022
Joint Winners: Emile Boulot and Joshua Sterlin
Steps Towards a Legal Ontological Turn: Proposals for Law's Place beyond the Human (Volume 11, Issue 1)
This very deep and thoughtful article written by two early career researchers makes a novel contribution to the literature on the rights of nature. It moves the debate beyond identifying the shortcomings of environmental law to suggest new ways of understanding our relationship to nature. The authors’ use of anthropological conceptual tools to better make sense of legal processes is particularly effective.
Bio: Emille Boulot is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She is completing her PhD at McGill University in Canada, and is a member of the Leadership for the Ecozoic project. Emille is also an Australian lawyer and holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Governance. Her research interests encompass a diverse range of topics, including environmental law and regulation, regulatory theory, interdisciplinary policy research and Indigenous legal rights. Emille is a Lionel Murphy Postgraduate scholar, a board member of the Australian Environment Review
Bio: Joshua Sterlin is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Canada, and is a member of the Leadership for the Ecozoic project. His scholarly training is in anthropology, holding an Msc in People and Environment (Anthropology) from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. His research ethnographically focuses on the growing nature-connection movement in North America, examining the means and methods in which these modern groups are attempting to ‘rewild’ not only themselves, but their cultures. He has extended this research studying the rewilding of Western cultures, and thinking animacy otherwise, by applying this lens to the genre of horror, as well as to the development of a law beyond the human. Joshua is a recipient of the Graduate Excellent Award, and a board member of Hunter-Gatherer Research. When not doing all the above, you can find him canoeing Québec’s north. You can reach him at: joshua.sterlin@mail.mcgill.ca.
Honourable Mention
Esmeralda Colombo, From Bushfires to Misfires: Climate-related Financial Risk after McVeigh v. Retail Employees Superannuation Trust (Volume 11, Issue 1)
This article, grounded in domestic case law through the McVeigh litigation and settlement, engages with an impressive array of literature from different disciplines and has a clear transnational relevance, shedding an interesting light on the role of transnational soft law in national climate litigation.
Bio: Esmeralda is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE), in Milan, after being a 2022 Fulbright-Schuman Postdoctoral Fellow on climate risk at UC Berkeley and an independent consultant. She has consulted with several governments and international organizations, including the Swiss federal government and the EU Commission, in matters concerning international and comparative climate law, EU climate law, clean energy and fin-tech. She received her PhD from the University of Bergen, Norway, with a thesis on Access to Justice in Climate Change Matters (2021), her LLMs from Columbia University and the College of Europe, her J.D. and Master’s Degree in International Law from the Catholic University of Milan, and a postgraduate certificate on clean energy finance from Yale University. She is admitted to the bar in Italy and New York State and is fluent in Italian, English, Spanish, French, and Norwegian. She is 35 years old and has published widely in international and comparative law, including climate law and policy, with 16 scientific articles, two monographs, and six contributions to peer-reviewed books. She has been a podcast host and speaker in over 36 conferences and scientific meetings, including as a guest lecturer in Kolkata and Phnom Penh.
Honourable Mention
Eva Bernet Kempers, Transition rather than Revolution: The Gradual Road towards Animal Legal Personhood through the Legislature (Volume 11, Issue 3)
This contribution considers pathways towards animal legal personhood. By proposing an incremental approach of growing rights, resulting eventually in personhood, it provides an alternative to the judicial, more ad hoc, route of legal reform. The author suggests we abandon the all or nothing approach to animal legal personhood advanced by the Animal Rights Pyramid, which situates legal personhood at the bottom of the pyramid as a precondition for all other rights. Key strengths of this piece are its solid engagement with the existing literature and approach to animal rights but then it’s willingness to think creatively about the rule of law and the normative and procedural benefits of challenging existing paradigms and thinking about the possibilities of the rule of law from a fresh perspective.
Bio: Eva Bernet Kempers wrote her PhD at the Animal & Law Chair of the University of Antwerp, Belgium. In her work, she aims to develop a continental law perspective on animal law, which has, until now, been primarily addressed from a common law perspective. Her manuscript on the continental law approach in animal law will be published this year. Besides doing research, Eva also works for the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, organizing workshops for law lecturers that want to teach animal law, and she is a co-founder of the Harrison Collective, an organization that pursues strategic litigation for production animals.
Other 2022 Shortlisted Articles
- Pauline Martini & Maud Sarliève, Fighting Deforestation in Non-International Armed Conflicts: The Relevance of the Rome Statute for Rosewood Trafficking in Senegal (Volume 11, Issue 1)
- Mingzhe Zhu, The Rule of Climate Policy: How Do Chinese Judges Contribute to Climate Governance without Climate Law? (Volume 11, Issue 1)
- Leslie-Anne Duvic-Paoli, Re-imagining the Making of Climate Law and Policy in Citizens’ Assemblies (Volume 11, Issue 2)
- Jocelyn Stacey, The Public Law Paradoxes of Climate Emergency Declarations (Volume 11, Issue 2)
- Björn Hoops, What If the Black Forest Owned Itself? A Constitutional Property Law Perspective on Rights of Nature (Volume 11, Issue 3)
- Peter Lawrence, Justifying Representation of Future Generations and Nature: Contradictory or Mutually Supporting Values? (Volume 11, Issue 3)
2022 Selection Panel
Veerle Heyvaert, Doug Kysar and Leonie Reins