Blogging from Brazil

David Cassuto

I’m live-blogging from the plane on my way to Rio.  Actually, that’s not true.  There’s no in-flight internet connection so by the time you read this, the time of writing will have long passed.  Indeed, this situation reifies the ongoing and insuperable challenge faced by all writers.  Time, a crucial component of all experience marches ever onward; the writer can only try to invoke through words that which can never come again.  Or, as Jean-François Lyotard puts it, “in description, writing tries to meet the challenge of being equal to its momentary absence.”  Upshot: even though I’m not live-blogging, I just like saying “live-blogging” so that’s what I did.

In any case, I’ll be in Brazil for the next several months, teaching at the Getulio Vargas Foundation School of Law in Rio (FGV Direito-Rio).  FGV is the only law school in Brazil that utilizes the Socratic method and is well on its way to developing a world class environmental law program under the direction of my former student now colleague, Romulo Sampaio.  My stay in Rio has been made possible through the good offices of the late great Senator Fulbright. 

Professor Sampaio and I recently created the Brazil-American Institute for Law and Environment (BAILE), based out of Pace and FGV.  BAILE is a non-profit research, teaching and policy center dedicated to fostering the relationship between the United States and Brazil and their shared goal of environmental protection and sustainable development. 

Why tell you all this?  Putting aside the foundational premise that one can never say enough about me, there also is an animal law component to this Brazilian sojourn.  My BAILE research agenda includes an article examining the role of the animal in Brazilian jurisprudence and also an international animal law conference in Salvador at which I will teach a workshop and give a lecture. 

Over time, I hope to build animal law more explicitly into the BAILE mission (the links to climate change, deforestation, water and land degradation and basic civil rights are clear, bilateral and urgent).  In the meanwhile, it will never lurk far from the surface of any environmental work that I do.

Btw, BAILE is offering a 2 week summer program this July that will focus on the fundaments of American, Brazilian and international environmental law.  The course will be held at Pace and is shaping up to be totally groovebar.  If this kind of stuff interests you, please come and tell all your friends to come too.