Sustainability and the Rule of Law

Supporting policy, systemic legal change and public interest litigation

European Court of Human Rights Intervention Clinic

The ECtHR Intervention Clinic run by Dr Martin Husovec in collaboration with an NGO, the European Information Society Institute (EISi), regularly intervenes before ECtHR in important cases involving digital liberties. It provides a unique opportunity for LSE LLM students to get involved in pending cases and suggest to the Court how to interpret the law before it makes its decision. The third party’s interventions are often cited by the Strasbourg court in its decisions. Our team of students was shortlisted for best Team at the Attorney General and LawWorks Pro Bono Awards in May 2025.

Sustainability Clinic

The Sustainability Law and Policy Clinic is an interdisciplinary initiative launched in September 2025 as part of the new Global School of Sustainability (GSoS). Together with the Sustainability Regulation Observatory, it constitutes one of the two flagship initiatives of GSoS’s Theme 3 on ‘Mobilising Political, Legal and Governance Systems’. It offers approximately 20 students from the LLB, BA in Anthropology and Law, LLM, and various Master’s programmes from across the LSE an opportunity to engage in real-world legal and policy work on pressing ecological issues. Working in collaborative teams under the supervision of Dr Marie Petersmann, students will tackle projects across GSoS’s three thematic pillars:

Protection of Nature and Biodiversity
Sustainable Finance and Business
Energy and Climate Change

Students will provide legal guidance to affected communities, draft policy reports in response to queries from environmental NGOs and charities, submit memos to UN Special Rapporteurs, and prepare amicus curiae briefs in environmental or climate litigation proceedings. Through these activities, students will gain hands-on experience through cross-disciplinary collaborations and external partnerships

Marie Petersmann is Assistant Professor at LSE Law School. Her research and teaching sit at the intersection of international environmental law, climate justice, ecology, and critical theory, exploring the complex nature of socio-ecological harms and their unevenly distributed impacts. She is the author of When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide (CUP, 2022), and co-author of Law and the Inhuman (CUP, forthcoming 2026). She earned her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and her LLM from the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Before entering academia, she worked for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in Geneva, bringing advocacy experience to her teaching and supervision of the Sustainability Law and Policy Clinic.

Policy Clinic

The Policy Clinic offers students the opportunity to work on real-world policy challenges with a focus on social justice. Working in small groups, students prepare written reports or presentations under supervision of a subject expert, in response to live issues raised by external partners.

Students collaborate across disciplines, drawing on the unique expertise of our academic community. The Clinic brings together students from law and other departments to explore complex policy questions and propose practical, research-informed solutions. Projects span a wide range of topics giving students valuable experience in policy analysis, communication, and advocacy.