STUDENT NEWS
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Her goals for the Caribbean are g In the fall of 2016, PhD candidate Alicia EliasRoberts became the first recipient of the Robert Sutherland Fellowship in Law, established in 2015 to honour Jamaican Robert Sutherland, Queen’s first Black graduate (1852) and British North America’s first Black lawyer. Both, it’s clear now, are born ground-breakers. Well into her fellowship’s second year, EliasRoberts claims her research has not only been enlightening but has also drastically broadened her outlook on the problems she set out to address: the West Indies’ inconsistent maritime oil and gas laws that stand in the way of a greener Caribbean, future prosperity and good global citizenship. Her research began with reading all the relevant literature so that she could start thinking outside the box and considering other sides of the arguments she intends to make. “It has been a challenging year,” she says. “I thought it would be easier, given my background, but studying at Queen’s has opened my eyes to fresh perspectives.” The background she refers to includes graduating from the University of Guyana at the top of her LLB class and earning a Certificate in Legislative Drafting from a program Guyana offers in collaboration with the Commonwealth Secretariat. She also holds a BCL from Oxford University and an LLM in Energy, Environment and Natural Resource Law from the University of Houston. That past is prologue to everything she set out to do in 2016. “The central themes of my thesis are still there,” she says, “but the legal and philosophical angles have changed. You might say I am now drilling far deeper below the 84 QUEEN’S LAW REPORTS ONLINE
Alicia Elias-Roberts, PhD in Law student, presents “Access to Justice in Environmental Matters in the Commonwealth Caribbean and the UK” at the Just Transition 2018 Conference in Edinburgh on March 1.
surface level – examining the issue of offshore energy development from a broader theoretical and philosophical perspective. “My main argument is that the relative normativity of international environmental law principles promotes weakness in the international legal order, so I will assess the problems surrounding the changing nature of sovereignty and its application to various environmental law problems. Then I hope to argue that a possible solution to those problems in offshore hydrocarbon projects is to conceptualize them under the liberal theory of international law. I will interrogate the application of communitarian values and global environmental governance in the West Indies and show why their application is flawed and incapable of resolving the Caribbean’s complex problems.”
