Department of Law: media player

Contributor(s): Douglas Kysar

Released on 22 May 2015

Frustrated with the pace of ongoing climate change policy negotiations, commentators and activists have increasingly called for resort to the courts to establish baseline principles of responsibility for harms caused or exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change. Such calls have targeted domestic courts and the common law of property and torts as well as international tribunals and the customary international law of transboundary harm. In both the domestic and international cases, advocates seek to position climate change as a problem best addressed through principles of law and justice, rather than merely politics and power. They hope to begin a process whereby reducing the threat of climate change comes to be seen as a moral and legal responsibility of dominant actors, rather than merely a gesture of charity toward weak and distant neighbours. This LSE Law (@LSELaw) lecture will provide an overview of these efforts and an assessment of whether, and how far, they might succeed.

Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His teaching and research areas include torts, environmental law, and risk regulation. He received his B.A. summa cum laude from Indiana University in 1995 and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1998, where he served on the student board of advisors. He has published articles on a wide array of environmental law and tort law topics, and is co-author of a leading casebook, The Torts Process, with James A. Henderson, Jr., Richard N. Pearson & John A. Siliciano. His recent book, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity (YUP 2010), seeks to reinvigorate environmental law and policy by offering novel theoretical insights on cost-benefit analysis, the precautionary principle, and sustainable development.

Dr Veerle Heyvaert (@vmlheyvaert) is Associate Professor (Reader) of Law at LSE.