Spotlight on Miriam Heipertz

Miriam Heipertz is a third-year PhD candidate at the Amsterdam Center for International Law and the Centre for European Law and Governance, where her research examines how the shift towards a “green” economy continues to rely on, and reshape, existing patterns of resource extraction. She is part of the interinstitutional Sustainable Global Economic Law Project and is currently visiting UNSW Law & Justice for approximately three months, where she is further developing her research through ongoing conversations with faculty while also focusing on sustained writing.

What attracted you to visit our faculty? 

I came to UNSW Law and Justice to work with Ntina Tzouvala, whose research has long shaped my thinking. More broadly, I was drawn to the Faculty’s strong culture of critical legal scholarship, particularly the way it is practised as a genuinely collective endeavour with a shared emphasis on academic craft. I am especially interested in contributing to and learning from collaborative spaces such as the Skillshare Circles and Reading Groups within the Critique Now network.

Can you tell us about your current research project or the work you’re most excited about right now?

My research examines a central tension in the so-called green transition. Rather than moving away from extraction, it often depends on its expansion. I focus on how law structures access to land and resources in this context, and how these processes are organised politically and economically, creating tensions between environmental commitments, economic growth and geopolitical competition.

I explore this through the example of the European Union and its efforts to secure access to critical raw materials. While the EU presents itself as a leader in sustainability, its approach builds on longer histories of securing resources within and beyond its borders along imperial and colonial lines. I am particularly interested in how law enables and accelerates these processes through techniques such as procedural streamlining, which can make projects possible more quickly while narrowing the space for contestation.

What questions or issues drive your research? 

I am motivated by a deceptively simple question: If we know that our current economic model is ecologically unsustainable, why does it persist? My work takes a critical and historically grounded approach to understanding how law helps sustain extractive dynamics in the context of the green transition.

How does your work connect with broader themes in law, justice or policy? 

My research connects to broader questions of justice in the ecological crisis, particularly how the costs of ecological transformation and the benefits of economic growth are distributed. It examines how law structures and legitimises these dynamics, often reproducing existing inequalities through the prioritisation of certain interests over others.

What kinds of conversations or collaborations are you hoping to spark while you're here? 

I am interested in developing comparative conversations between the EU and Australia around natural resource governance, particularly in relation to land, colonial dispossession and Indigenous rights. I am also keen to think more broadly about how law governs time, especially the role of acceleration and procedural streamlining as governance techniques. More generally, I am looking forward to contributing to and learning from conversations about academic craft and collective ways of working through the Skillshare Circles convened by Ben Golder.

What real-world impact do you hope your work will have? 

I hope my work creates space to question how ecological crisis and inequality are framed, and to make visible the assumptions that sustain them. I want it to be useful both to those resisting these conditions and to scholars grappling with questions of ecological transformation and justice.

What’s something you think the Australian legal community should be paying more attention to right now? 

We need to pay closer attention to how debates about resources are increasingly framed in terms of sovereignty, security and strategic competition in Australia. In the global rush for critical raw materials, what we are seeing is not a move away from extraction, but its expansion and reorganisation, often justified through the language of sustainability. This can obscure its role in advancing defence, resilience and competitive interests.

The question is not only whether extraction should occur, but how it is organised, how it is justified, and whose interests it serves. These issues raise urgent concerns about the reproduction of inequality, the continued dispossession of Indigenous communities, and entrenched patterns of unequal global exchange.

Have you had a chance to explore campus or Sydney yet? 

I have had the chance to explore Sydney and the UNSW Kensington campus. The coastline and the Blue Mountains are extraordinary, but what has stood out most is the shared workspace for law Higher Degree Research candidates. There is something special about people from different fields working alongside each other every day, exchanging ideas and taking each other’s work seriously. It creates a sense of intellectual community that goes well beyond formal seminars and has really shaped how I think about academic work and the environments that allow ideas to develop.