DDRO 27A64 - Climate Law

Spoiler alert: this class will not tell you how to “solve” climate change. But it will, hopefully, give you a better understanding of why climate change feels so sprawling and intractable despite its obvious, screaming urgency and its increasingly disastrous impacts. Facing a problem as broad as climate change requires a broad approach, and so this course will take one, but its throughline is the law—what the law has done for us and to us, and what the law could still provide for us. In other words, this is an introduction to the several bodies of law that intersect at the climate.

Before wading into the cross-cutting bodies of law increasingly called climate change law, the course will start with a geophysical introduction to climate change. After all, a basic grasp of the problem and our understanding of it is foundational to any attempt to address it. The course will then turn to the legal history behind climate change by delving into the basics of the legal regimes that led and contributed to climate change as we know it. These include but are not limited to property, contracts, corporations, and trade law. Only then will the course turn to the attempts to address climate change through law. These efforts have taken place at the international level, namely through United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, and at the national and EU levels, and the course will touch on each of these. The course will also talk about the rising trend in climate litigation—its successes, its failures, its strategies and ambitions, and its surprising transnational quality. Finally, the course will introduce students to geoengineering, the broad collection of technologies that promise to mitigate the impacts of climate change by intervening in the climate system itself, and the legal haziness that accompanies it.

This course is a seminar, and as such all I encourage, hope, and expect all students to participate in class discussions. Taking notes by hand is mandatory (either using a notebook or a tablet). Of course, this doesn’t apply to students who need to use a computer for accessibility purposes—just let me know. Likewise, smartphones and all other screens are generally forbidden in class. For certain sessions and exercises, or to fact check the teacher, a laptop or tablet connected to the internet will be useful.