Susan D. E-Shaw advises boards, governments, investors, and international institutions on the legal dimensions of systemic environmental transition. A Scottish-qualified solicitor and UN-recognised legal expert, she operates at the intersection of environment, human rights, and governance — translating complex scientific and regulatory landscapes into legally defensible frameworks, credible transition pathways, and investment-grade decisions.

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She founded Living Law® in 2012 — prior to the market adoption of Rights of Nature, prior to biodiversity accountability becoming regulatory practice, and prior to systemic transition becoming a board-level concern. Her work is grounded in two decades of practice across multi-level governance systems, spanning litigation leadership, multilateral diplomacy, compliance oversight, and governance reform — producing a depth of experience that cannot be replicated through newly assembled teams or short-cycle advisory models.

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Her approach is defined by Ecovation in Law — integrating legal analysis with scientific evidence, rights-based frameworks, and governance design. This approach is grounded in her LLM research at Stockholm University — International Law in the Anthropocene: Within Planetary Boundaries — which directly engaged the Stockholm Resilience Centre's planetary boundaries framework and forms the intellectual foundation of her systemic transition practice.

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Susan's work spans boardrooms, national governments, and multilateral treaty bodies. She has led EU-wide strategic litigation and advocacy across 29 jurisdictions, including test case litigation before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). She has contributed to major environmental legislation, pioneered legal approaches to greenwashing and ESG accountability before those concepts entered mainstream regulatory debate, and has given oral evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee of the UK House of Commons. She appears before the bodies that shape legal and regulatory frameworks — engaging not only with the application of law, but with its formation.

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Her credentials include appointment as Legal Expert Member to the UN Harmony with Nature programme (Earth Jurisprudence) — a formal UN programme with a mandate to advance Earth-centred legal frameworks globally — and Expert Membership of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law. Her published work is cited in the development of Earth Law, Environmental Democracy, the Rights of Nature, and ecological jurisprudence.

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Susan works to position clients ahead of regulatory and market shifts — securing legally defensible positions, strengthening institutional resilience and intelligence, and enabling participation in the managed transition to a nature-aligned economy.

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