Education

Grear graduated from the University of Bristol (LLB (Hons)), Oxford Brookes University (DLL) and First Class from St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she has a Bachelor of Civil Law degree.^[6]

Professorships and jurisprudence

From May 2000 to January 2006, Grear was Senior Lecturer in Law at Oxford Brookes University; from February 2006 to January 2012, she was Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of the West of England. From February 2012 to June 2013, she was associate professor of law at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. In 2013, she took up a post as Reader in Law at Cardiff University, where she held a Personal Chair as Professor of Law and Theory until end of August 2023.

Grear holds professional memberships at several international institutions. She is an Invited Professor at the Westminster Centre for Law and Theory in London, 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 in New Zealand, an Associate Fellow of the New Economy Law Centre at Vermont Law School,^[7] and a Global Affiliate to the Vulnerability and Human Condition Collaboration at Emory University.^[6]

Grear's 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, rights theory, human rights theory^[8] and human rights and the environment.^[9]

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."^[10]

In 2018, Grear was one of 1,400 academics who wrote to The Sunday Times urging that Britain remain in the European Union.^[11]

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.^[12]

In 2014, she co-founded Incredible Edible Bristol, an urban food-growing movement, with horticulturist Sara Venn.^[13]

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.^[14] Grear has since started a podcast, which will continue the exploration of the summit themes.^[15]

Grear works as a therapeutic coach and has an independent online programme for people suffering from longterm, complex and chronic fatigue conditions.^[16]

Honours

In 2007, Grear was awarded a Visiting Scholarship at St John's College, Oxford, which involved a competitive application process. 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.^[6]