Digital Transformation and Environmental Legal Education: A Framework for Next-Generation Pedagogy in the Anthropocene

Despite extensive scholarship on digital transformation in higher education, its application to environmental legal education remains under-examined. This article seeks to address this gap by proposing a multidisciplinary and theoretically informed framework, based on a synthesis of prior empirical studies on environmental law teaching. This study adopts a structured integrative literature synthesis approach. Relevant studies were identified through a systematic search of major academic databases using predefined keywords related to digital pedagogy, legal education, and environmental governance. The selected literature was thematically analyzed to construct a domain-specific conceptual framework for environmental legal education. Rather than reporting new empirical data, the framework is grounded in findings from existing empirical research. This article draws upon the digital competency frameworks, next-generation pedagogical models, and transformational digital learning theories of other disciplinary fields, and argues that the digital transformation of pedagogical models is not merely a technological enhancement, but is fundamentally a requirement for the teaching of environmental law in the Anthropocene. With this in mind, the article puts forward three key contributions. Firstly, it integrates frameworks of legal pedagogy and digital competence to demonstrate a particular educational model. Secondly, it collates legal pedagogy’s emerging empirical research to substantiate previous theoretical contributions. Thirdly, it examines pedagogy’s governance and quality assurance in terms of legal education in the EU and internationally. The article also outlines digital instruments for assessing competence in environmental law teaching and for supporting future empirical research on AI-enhanced environmental legal education.