The Tarkine, the devil, and the tiger. Environmental law histories and futures

Brad Jessup is a human geographer, environmental law specialist, and academic who offers global, national, comparative and local perspectives in his research. At present, he serves as a deputy director of the Melbourne Centre for Law and Environment and as convenor of the Australian Legal Geography Study Group. He is a Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School.

Brad's research and teaching cross disciplines in the tradition of legal geography and draw on political theories, his expert knowledge of environmental law processes, and case study examples of law in society. Brad is especially interested in the role of the law, lawyers, society and policy in responding to risk and threats of harm.

Before joining Melbourne Law School in 2012, Brad was a lecturer and researcher at the ANU College of Law, and previously practised as a planning and environmental lawyer at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer. Brad completed his PhD with the Australian National University in 2019, winning the Australian Legal Research Awards’ best thesis prize, and holds a Master's degree in Geography from the University of Cambridge where he studied on a Commonwealth Scholarship. He has also held visiting appointments at Oxford, UCL, and UC Berkeley.

Brad will speak about his legal research on environmental protection and species conservation in Tasmania, with a focus on the place known as the Tarkine / Takayna. The starting points for the research have been political decisions not to protect landscapes, government decisions to approve mining developments in habitat of the Tasmanian Devil, and scientific endeavours to de-extinct a community of Tasmanian Tiger. Brad will suggest that a key limitation of Australian law is that it seeks to protect species and iconic or totemic landscapes, and not habitat, and that failure is especially pronounced when species reintroduction is proposed or when species relocation occurs.