Jo Goodie

Biography

Before joining Murdoch University as a legal academic I worked in the private legal practice in Victoria and, as a public lawyer in WA. I was the inaugural solicitor at the Bunbury Community Legal Centre. I was admitted to practice as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria in 1990 and as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Western Australia in 1992.I teach in both the Law and Legal Studies programmes in a range of subjects: LAW258 Australian Administrative Law; LEG153 Introduction to Administrative Law; LAW150 Australian Legal Systems. My research examines the significance of ‘crisis’ and ‘security’ in shaping the trajectory of environmental governance, focusing on how the law takes up non-legal ideas, knowledge and rhetoric to conceptualise and calculate the risks and legal responsibilities associated with global warming/climate change.  While environment law is the principal focus of my research, I have also published on family law and the legal conceptualisation of young people. I am co-author (with Gary Wickham, Sociology Murdoch University) of Legal and Political Challenges of Governing the Environment and Climate Change: Ruling Nature, Routledge 2013. The book investigates how law and politics first came upon the environment as an object in need of special attention. It outlines the unlikely intersection of aesthetics and science that made ‘the environment’ into the matter of great concern it is today. We consider the way private common-law strategies and public-law legislative strategies have approached the task of protecting the environment, and explore the greatest environmental challenge to have so far confronted environmental law and politics; the threat of global climate change.

Research Interest

The principal focus of my research is the emergence and development of environmental law. Currently I am investigating the significance of ‘crisis’ and ‘security’ in shaping the trajectory of environmental governance; examining how the law takes up non-legal ideas, knowledge and rhetoric to conceptualise and calculate the risks and legal responsibilities associated with global warming/climate change. My research with Professor Emeritus Gary Wickham considers how the politics of the state is tempered by offices of public law. This work complements the ongoing investigation of the operation of climate change litigation, in particular how the rational discourse and practice of public law allows complex political problems such as climate change to be incorporated into the legal order.