Law Seminar Series

UWS School of Law Seminar Series

Current Legal Issues

The School of Law Seminar Series operates during teaching semesters at the University of Western Sydney.

Seminars are held every second Wednesday between 11.30am and 12.30pm in the Moot Court, Building EO, Parramatta Campus (map), unless otherwise indicated. Light refreshments will be served.

If you would like to attend the UWS School of Law Seminars or be added to circulation lists, please email m.nehme@uws.edu.au

Upcoming Seminar            Schedule for 2013 Seminars

Upcoming Speaker

Bio:

Liesel Spencer joined the School of Law at UWS in 2007. Prior to joining the school, she spent two years as a sessional law lecturer with UWS, the University of Sydney, and the University of Wollongong. Her working history also includes positions in legal publishing with Law Book Company (now Thompson), as a commercial litigation paralegal, and in journalism. Her current scholarship is in the intersection between the local government law, public health law and urban planning disciplines. She is writing a PhD thesis on the use of local government law for sustainable public health. She also publishes in the area of legal education, on the use of exemplars and on motivating law students to engage in reading. 

 Abstract:

Local councils in New South Wales have multiple priorities and limited resources. Public health and environmental health are significant areas councils have to take into account in the exercise of their planning, policy-making, expenditure and regulatory functions. The emerging theory of ‘cobenefits’, suggests that local councils can better reconcile priorities within resource constraints, by exercising functions in ways that acknowledge the interdependency of human health and ecological health. The urban agriculture (‘city farming’) model, developed in Cuba as a response to the 1990s economic crisis, has had positive impacts on Cuban public health and environmental health. By internationally recognised measures, Cuba is a model of sustainability. Cuba’s low ecological footprint per person, low infant mortality and high life expectancy, are an anomalous combination in the developed world. These public health outcomes have been achieved with much lower public health expenditure per capita than is the case in New South Wales. Local councils in New South Wales, in planning for public health and environmental health (and planning for climate change mitigation and post peak-oil economies) can adapt and apply the Cuban model of urban agriculture to suit New South Wales local government legal structures. This paper proposes ways in which the legal structures supporting the Cuban model (including the Organopónicos, Unidades Basicas de Producción Cooperativas, and Mercados Agropecuarios) can be modified and translated to the New South Wales context.