British legal scholar
Anna Maria Grear (born 4 September 1959) is an English academic, author, and political activist. Grear is the founder of several academic and activist organisations, including the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE) and the "Journal of Human Rights and the Environment", where she is editor-in-chief. Grear is adjunct professor of law at the University of Waikato and was professor of law and theory at Cardiff University until 2023. She has written for such international newspapers as "The Wire" and "Süddeutsche Zeitung". She is also the owner of HypnoCatalyst, an organisation specialising in integrative psychotherapy.
Biography.
Education.
Grear received an LL.B with honours from the University of Bristol, an LL.D. from Oxford Brookes University and a first class B.C.L. from St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Professorships and jurisprudence.
Grear was senior lecturer in law at Oxford Brookes University from May 2000 to January 2006, senior lecturer in law at the University of the West of England from February 2006 to January 2012, and associate professor of law at the University of Waikato from February 2012 to June 2013. In 2013, she took up a post as reader in law at Cardiff University, where she later held a personal chair as professor of law and theory until 31 August 2023.
Grear holds professional memberships at several international institutions. She is an invited professor at the Westminster Centre for Law and Theory, a member of the Dahrendorf Network in Berlin, and a member of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Additionally, Grear is adjunct professor of law at the University of Waikato, an associate fellow of the New Economy Law Centre at Vermont Law School, and a global affiliate to the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative at Emory University.
Grear's academic work focuses on a range of issues around law's dominant imaginary, the way it constructs the world, imagines the human and the more-than-human. Her work therefore embraces questions around legal subjectivity, the meaning of the human, the significance of materiality for law and theory, rights theory, human rights theory and human rights and the environment. 
Political and environmental activism.
In March 2010, Grear founded the "Journal of Human Rights and the Environment", a double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly journal. She has served as editor-in-chief ever since.
With Professor Tom Kerns, Grear co-initiated the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal on Climate Change, Fracking and Human Rights. The online tribunal hearings were streamed globally from 14 to 18 May 2018 in a first for the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal. The Advisory Opinion recommended a world-wide ban on fracking. Commenting on the tribunal, Grear said "the PPT will play a unique and vitally important role in presenting and rehearsing testimony, arguments and law to lay down an informal but highly expert precedent, with potential for future use in national and international courts of law. The PPT will also educate a wide range of parties and the general public about the human rights dimensions of fracking. This really is a Peoples' tribunal. It belongs to communities and individuals from all over the world and it aims to produce a highly influential, legally literate and serious judgement of the issues by some of the world’s finest legal minds as a trail blazing example for future legal actions, when and where appropriate."
In 2018, Grear was one of 1,400 academics who wrote to "The Sunday Times" urging that Britain remain in the European Union.
Other work.
In January 2010, Grear founded the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE), an international network for scholars, policy-makers and activists "for the creation of change", where she is now former director.
In 2014, she co-founded Incredible Edible Bristol, an urban food-growing movement, with horticulturist Sara Venn.
In 2022, Grear hosted a summit on fatigue, linking fatigue to planetary and environmental exhaustion, toxicities of contemporary life and to shifts in human consciousness. Guests included leading health and recovery experts, as well as a couple of scholars working with environmental themes, posthumanism and critical theory. Grear has since started a podcast, 'The Fatigue Files', which continues the exploration of the summit themes.
Grear also works as an integrative therapeutic coach. She is the owner of HypnoCatalyst, an independent online programme for people suffering from longterm, complex and chronic fatigue conditions.
Honours.
In 2007, Grear was awarded one of six visiting scholarships at St John's College, Oxford, which involved a competitive application process, alongside Benedict Read and Henrike Lähnemann. Similarly competitive, she was awarded an international seminar by the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain, in 2011. In the intervening years, she was appointed to several fellowships and professorships internationally, and in 2018 she was shortlisted for an IUCN Academy of Environmental Law Senior Scholarship Award.
References.
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