Rethinking Clean Air: Air Quality Law and Covid-19

Air quality has long been a serious health problem caused by industrialisation and urbanisation.1 It has also been a very difficult policy and regulatory problem to address.2 This is partly a problem of regulatory strategy—what suite of measures work together to reduce air pollution levels without simply displacing pollution? It is partly a problem of controlling individual behaviour—as a collective problem, many individual actions generate air pollution. It is partly a problem of policy priority—air quality is often traded off against economic progress. And it is partly a failure of governance—identifying the appropriate actors to govern air quality and ensuring they work in concert. It is also a matter of defining what is acceptable air quality in the first place, and expressing this in law. None of these issues had been resolved well before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The pandemic sheds these air quality law challenges in a new light. It is a public health crisis with many links to air quality, whether related to air pollution and its impacts on disease outcomes, or by examining the transmission pathways of COVID-19. Responding to the pandemic has involved bold regulatory experiments, heavily restricting behaviours, such as movements across transport networks, that are prime causes of urban nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution in particular. Above all, the pandemic has increased the profile of air quality as a social problem to address, creating a moment to rethink this problem and what we might do about it

Legislation and the Stress of Environmental Problems

For lawyers and legal scholars, legislation seems a known quantity—a relatively permanent, public expression of democratic processes in parliamentary democracies and of the rule of law. This ‘knowable’ character can however be misleading, particularly in the field of environmental law. This article examines why research into environmental legislation is challenging but critically important. A short history of UK environmental law provides salient examples of political stress and highly complex, unsettled, even unknowable, environmental legislation. Collective environmental problems demand legislative responses in shaping individual behaviours and guiding social policies—but knowing how to craft these responses and how to evaluate the resulting legislation is often uncharted legal territory. Navigating that legislative terrain is a vital task for legal scholars and practitioners, particularly to investigate the serious legal problems that can arise from its construction, including poor legibility, legal fragmentation, and concerns about compatibility with the rule of law

Fock representations of ZF algebras and R-matrices

A variation of the Zamolodchikov–Faddeev algebra over a finite-dimensional Hilbert space H and an involutive unitary R-Matrix S is studied. This algebra carries a natural vacuum state, and the corresponding Fock representation spaces FS(H) are shown to satisfy FS⊞R(H⊕K)≅FS(H)⊗FR(K), where S⊞R is the box-sum of S (on H⊗H) and R (on K⊗K). This analysis generalises the well-known structure of Bose/Fermi Fock spaces and a recent result of Pennig. These representations are motivated from quantum field theory (short-distance scaling limits of integrable models)

The Legally Disruptive Nature of Climate Change

Climate change gives rise to disputes and problems not easily addressed by existing legal doctrines and frameworks. This is because it is a polycentric problem; the assessment of future climate impacts must deal with uncertainty; climate change is socio-politically controversial; and addressing climate change requires recognising a dynamic physical environment. As such, climate change can be thought of as legally disruptive in that it requires lawyers and legal scholars to reconcile the legal issues raised by climate change with existing legal orders. The legal disruption catalysed by climate change has not only led to the creation of new legal regimes but also given rise to a multitude of legal disputes that require adjudication. A study of some of these cases highlights the need for active and deliberate reflection about the nature of adjudication and the legal reasoning embedded in it when confronted by a disruptive phenomenon like climate change

Climate Change and National Laws across Commonwealth Countries

This paper furthers the Commonwealth agenda on climate action by exploring the kinds of ‘practical and swift action’ that might be taken through national legal frameworks to implement the Paris Agreement. The paper reviews national laws of Commonwealth member countries as they currently apply to and intersect with climate change. The paper investigates legal measures that relate directly to implement climate change policy, including climate change legislation and regulatory instruments such as emissions trading schemes and energy efficiency measures. It also considers indirect legal measures that can provide ‘co-benefits’ in relation to climate change policy, such as waste legislation and air quality measures. The paper presents examples of these different kinds of climate intersections in different Commonwealth legal systems, highlighting examples of what has worked well and what has not worked well to date, within different legal, economic and political cultures, and in different geographies and climates