The 40th anniversary of the Journal: observing and analysing the evolution of energy and natural resources law

This issue of the Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law marks the start of its 40th year of publication. From an initial readership consisting primarily of several hundred members of the then newly established Section on Energy and Natural Resources Law of the International Bar Association (IBA), today’s Journal has grown and matured into a publication that is ranked among the most prestigious journals of its kind in the energy and natural resources fields. Today, not only is the Journal read by the members of the Section on Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law (SEERIL), but its contents are annually researched and used by tens of thousands of individuals across the globe via its website. In short, the growth in usage of the Journal’s contents has been nothing short of meteoric. And the growth in readership and the strength of content continues on a year-on-year basis. To a large degree, the Journal’s success can be attributed to the solid foundation that was explained in the first editorial published in January 1983. In that piece founding editor Terence Daintith, then Professor of Public Law at the University of Dundee, identified several ‘purposes and characteristics’ that the Journal would be based on and that continue to guide the Journal today. Daintith pointed out that ‘Energy and natural resources law has special features which, in our view, demand a rather particular kind of periodical’. In this regard, he pointed to three concepts: (1) this branch of law cuts across many legal categories such as public law, private law, contract, tort and so on; (2) it is largely a ‘transnational phenomenon’where ‘much of the law [is] developed in international frameworks or in transnational contracts for energy or resource development’; and (3) this area of the law ‘has to a remarkable degree been built up, and is still being developed and advanced, by the efforts of practicing lawyers in creating new legal instruments to meet the challenges of the resources industries’.