Laura Schuijers

Dr Schuijers is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Law School. Her research interests include environmental law, climate change law, and sustainability governance.

With a unique background in law and environmental science which has included post-graduate training across four different faculties, interdisciplinarity is a hallmark of Dr Schuijers' scholarship. She considers how systems thinking, adaptive governance, and resilience are relevant to environmental decision-making, legislation, policy, and jurisprudence. Her work has covered topics such as science-informed policy, science in the courtroom, cross-sectoral decarbonisation of the economy, and the operation of the precautionary principle in the context of scientific uncertainty. Her work has appeared in Australian and international law journals.

Dr Schuijers' interest in comparative law has led her to conduct her scholarship at Columbia University, where she was supported by the Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law, Lewis and Clarke College in Oregon, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University Law Faculty. The impact of her work extends beyond Australia, particularly with respect to the integration between science, law and policy in tackling some of the major global environmental challenges like biodiversity loss and climate change.

Dr Schuijers engages with both the grounded and theoretical aspects of the challenges which she explores in her research, striving to contribute innovation and practically-minded commentary to her field. She is trained in plain-language communication and research translation. From 2018-2020, as the recipient of the Foote Fellowship in Climate Solutions, her work was based at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, where she managed the production of significant cross-faculty collaborations, and ran a series of associated roundtable workshops and events for senior government officers, corporate management, and leading academic experts.

Currently, Dr Schuijers is working on an ARC funded project that explores the intersection of property law, environmental law, and legal theory, including for biodiversity conservation. Dr Schuijers is an expert in legislation that governs environmental decision-making; her PhD thesis investigated the context of major fracking proposals, and the extent to which the EPBC Act is effective in managing environmental risk.