I come from a “straight” legal background – trained at a top 20 global law firm and became senior solicitor in a top 100 law firm specialising in public and environmental law related matters. In 2012 I was inspired by my experiences through the Occupy Movement to leave private law practice and begin a living research inquiry – what would a legal practice look like that could live up to question that the late Polly Higgins gifted to me: how do you “bring love into law”?
Since finishing a Masters in Ecological Design Thinking at Schumacher College in 2016, the vehicle for grounding that that has become New Economy Law.
I bring into New Economy Law the learnings gained from Extinction Rebellion. It was still only a nascent movement when I was invited by Gail Bradbrook to join its first Political Strategy team in late 2018. Through co-leading its first Political Strategy, including and up to those first hopeful discussions with Michael Gove as Environment Secretary, I learnt that love can also come from a place of fierce protection and action, and that accountability has a place in the realm of love as much as its qualities of expansiveness and joy.
NEL seeks to anchor its work in a set of values that could be called spiritual, particularly the values of “sacred trust” and “sacred balance” that are called for within Islamic/Sufi principles.
Grounding those beliefs into legal action – such as my work with the Good Law Project on a test case on the “Public Trust Doctrine” to safeguard rivers from sewage pollution, or my work with Nudge Community Builders to bring a high street into community ownership – is how I now conceive of love being brought into law.
I also teach Environmental Law p/t at the University of Law, as well as a guest lecturer for Royal Holloway University’s Global Futures MSc.
Some Links
Talk at the Vaults Festival 2020: “Decoloniality & Rewilding Psyche“
Resurgence & Ecologist articles & podcast:
- Resurgence Voices podcast: “Forging identities through Collective Action” (February 2019)
- “Extinction Rebellion: A Civil Rights Movement?” (May 2019)
- “XR on Cambridge Trinity Lawn” (joint article, March 2020)
- “Equality: Our Hope for a Future” (Dec 2021)
Faith & Eco-spirituality
- BBC: Asian Network Reports – “Extinction Rebellion: Faith & Culture” (April 2019)
- G7 Protests, St Ives (June 2021): Calling in an eco-mythic narrative, as well as ancestral song-lines/feminine energy to meet what is needed to shift the “death spiral” trajectory
- Accidental Gods Podcast: “Spiritual Activism & Wildlaw in Action”
Bridging the political with the de-colonial and spiritual
- STIR to Action: Community Charters, Law & Power (Winter 2018)
