Distinguished environmental law scholar Maxine Burkett will visit the law school’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics next month to give a major public address, help teach a law school course and meet with various students and community groups.
Burkett, the first of two visiting chairs for 2010-2011, will be in residence at the School of Law this September and October to co-teach a class with law professor Richard Hildreth on environmental justice.
Margaret Hallock, the Morse Center’s director, said Burkett will bring a new method of climate policy instruction to the law school’s classrooms and broaden the discipline’s focus to incorporate notions of humanitarianism.
“We hope that professor Burkett can add to the focus on environmental justice and issues of human rights and climate change,” Hallock said. “She will add an environmental justice component to this class so that students can know about this aspect of climate policy.”
The Morse Center, named in honor of Oregon’s historic Senator Wayne Morse, has appointed Wayne Morse Chairs for Law and Politics nearly every academic year for the past 26 years, with a keen eye for professionals from a variety of disciplines who share Morse’s vision of peace and justice through politics.
“Visitors who hold the Wayne Morse Chair are either top notch scholars or public figures,” Hallock said. “They must possess the characteristics of Wayne Morse: independence, integrity, concern for civil rights and labor rights and adherence to the rule of law.”
As an associate professor of law and the inaugural director of the Center for Island Climate Adaptation and Policy at the Univeristy of Hawaii at Manoa, Burkett taught courses in the fields of torts, climate change, race and American law, environmental law and international development. Living in the tropical archipelago and witnessing the effects of climate change on small island communities firsthand has motivated Burkett to focus her studies on climate justice and to analyze the disproportionate impacts of climate change on poor and colored communities.
“I was actually born in Jamaica, and much of my family lives on the island,” Burkett said in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin last year. “Jamaicans have a carbon footprint that is miniscule compared to the U.S. and Hawaii citizens … (and) the fact that they are getting hit first by warmer seas, dying reefs and longer and more intense hurricanes is a tragic irony.”
Burkett said climate justice is concerned with “the heavy and disproportionate burden climate change is placing on already vulnerable communities.” She thinks these communities have contributed less than their fair share of the greenhouse gasses and other pollutants that have spawned such grave environmental dangers.
The Morse Center adopts a theme of inquiry every two years to facilitate discourse surrounding pressing issues relating to law and policy, and 2010-11 will be the final year of “Climate Ethics and Climate Equity.” This theme was selected to examine the ethical issues of climate change and to discuss solutions incorporating national and international environmental justice.
“The Climate Ethics and Climate Equity theme is meant to add to the ongoing public and scholarly conversation on climate change,” Hallock said. “We take the science as given, that global warming is occurring … (and have) decided to focus on ethical issues, as these issues are not being emphasized in the many other environmental programs at the UO.”
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