Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Cle Working Paper No.2/2020--Responsible Scholarship In A Crisis: A Plea For Fairness In Academic Discourse On The Carbon Pricing References, Stepan Wood, Meinhard Doelle, Dayna Nadine Scott

Centre for Law and the Environment

The Canadian federal government's carbon pricing legislation has generated substantial public and academic debate. In this paper we argue that academic debate should adhere to standards for responsible conduct of research during crises such as the current climate emergency, and avoid the nastiness and distortion that infect populist political rhetoric and social media. We discuss the norms of responsible scholarship that apply to Canadian legal academics, with a focus on standards that demand scrupulous fairness to other scholars and to the materials one is analyzing. We argue that a recent article by Professor Dwight Newman on the Saskatchewan and Ontario …