Melanie Murcott, a senior lecturer in the Department of Public Law is an admitted attorney of the High Court of South Africa and a solicitor of England and Wales (non-practising). She is currently reading towards her LLD in environmental law with her thesis on the potential of environmental law to contribute towards social justice in South Africa.
Melanie serves on the executive committee of the Environmental Law Association (ELA) and in August 2015 presented a paper at the ELA’s annual conference on “The role of a legal theory of transformative environmental constitutionalism in solving South Africa’s acid mine drainage problem”.
Internationally, she is part of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law, which hosts an international colloquium in environmental law each year. At the Academy’s 13th annual colloquium held at Atma Jaya University in Jakarta in September 2015, she presented a paper titled “Fighting for the fish, forests and people of Dwesa-Cwebe in pursuit of transformative constitutional environmentalism” to a global audience of environmental scholars.
She envisages a future institute at the University of Pretoria that will engage in activism, research and litigation on environmental rights issues, and as part of this she would include a clinic where law students could advise members of the public on environmental rights violations.
