Water plus Earth, Wind and Fire. No … it’s not a day at the beach with a great band from Chicago. These are the names of the four classical elements, which in ancient times were thought to explain the nature of how the world worked. They are also the subjects of the next four LawNow […]
About Jeff Surtees
Jeff Surtees, BComm, JD, LLM, is the Executive Director of the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta.
Note from the Publisher
August 30, 2019 By Jeff Surtees
Hello LawNow readers, From all of us here at the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta (CPLEA), we hope you had an enjoyable and relaxing summer! As many of you know, LawNow is published six times per year by CPLEA. This issue marks the start of LawNow’s forty-fourth year of publication. We wanted to take […]
How Are Environmental Laws Made?
May 3, 2019 By Jeff Surtees
Written environmental laws come in all different sizes and shapes. For example, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 has 356 sections, six schedules and fifty-seven sets of regulations. Other environmental laws are only one page long. Big or small, they all have a few things in common. They must be put in place by a […]
Important Concepts in Environmental Law – “Polluter Pays”
March 5, 2019 By Jeff Surtees
Your parents may have told you: “If you make a mess, you have to clean it up.” In a nutshell, that is the basis of the “polluter pays” principle. There is a lot wrapped up inside the simple principle of polluter pays. The roots of the principle come from economics rather than from environmentalism. The […]
Important Concepts in Environmental Law – The “Precautionary Principle”.
December 12, 2018 By Jeff Surtees
Last issue we talked about sustainable development. This time the topic is the precautionary principle. Most human activity has risk. When we are deciding whether we should do something, we balance the risks against the possible rewards. Risk has two parts. First, there is the probability that something bad will happen. Second, there is the […]
