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Legislative and regulatory frameworks for conserving biodiversity often focus on the species as a fundamental unit for protection. In cases where the taxonomic or conservation status of a species is uncertain, the precautionary principle may be invoked in listing suspected but as yet undescribed taxa as vulnerable or endangered. In this paper, we present an evaluation of the taxonomic status of what has been regarded as a distinctive but as yet undescribed species of freshwater turtle, declared endangered in the Action Plan for Australian Reptiles and vulnerable in the schedules of state and federal conservation acts. Using mitochondrial sequence variation, we show that the Bellinger River turtle is an unremarkable population of a common and widespread species, Emydura macquarii. In addition, we present evidence suggesting that it may have been recently introduced to, or may be a recent invader of, the Bellinger River (New South Wales, Australia) where it may come to compete with Myuchelys georgesi, an endemic found only in the Bellinger River. Our study illustrates the need to couple fundamental research with on-ground action early in an adaptive management context, particularly where taxonomic status of the target species is uncertain. Short-term cost savings of failing to do so may come to be greatly exceeded by longer-term opportunity loss where conservation dollars are limited.

This article argues that environmental regimes entailing considerable administrative discretion are now serving to contextualise and partly to constitute property rights in English law. In particular, rights to use land are ‘democratised’ to varying degrees through the administration of environmental regulation, and are adapted to land‐use problems on an evolving basis. In return, property rights affect environmental regulation, through legal protections for property interests, although the nature of the discretion exercised within environmental regimes seems to determine the kind and extent of this symbiotic influence. As a result, environmental law challenges property scholars to reflect on the impact of administrative decision‐making on property rights, conceptually, doctrinally and in terms of its legitimacy. At the same time, environmental lawyers need to take seriously the nature and legal treatment of property rights in the application and analysis of modern environmental law.

This article examines the role of property ideologies, and the local contexts in which they were articulated and applied, in shaping English and Irish land law. Despite their shared histories and influences – from the transplant of the common law system to Ireland to traditions of training Irish lawyers and judges in English universities – the politics of property led Irish and English land law down distinct, and sometimes oppositional, ideological paths in the twentieth century. The politics and practices of land tenure, competing economic and property ideologies, and their direct links to the evolution of national identity and statehood in each jurisdiction, shaped the foundational commitments of English and Irish land law. The article traces the complexities of lived experience in regulating the use and ownership of land, as well as the role of global and local forces – from world-system movements (for example, the influence of European political developments in 1937 on the Irish Constitution) or bi-lateral relationships (for example, the impact of the Irish land wars on the English land reform movement, or the ongoing trade dependency between Britain and Ireland into the twentieth century). Our analysis reveals the multiple competing, and at times overlapping, property ideologies that shape property systems; and the powerful role of events and externalities in contextualising the practical, political, social and symbolic meaning and content of the law as it has evolved in local contexts, and in determining whether, and when, the status quo prevails, or a tipping point for law reform is reached.

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