LL4GK      Half Unit
Tackling Climate Change: Legal Strategies

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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This course explores different regulatory and policy strategies to tackle climate change, casting light on their implications, limits, and relevant challenges on the path to net-zero. It draws on a distinctive problem-oriented approach and employs specific case studies, cutting across the fields of public international law, trade law, US law, EU law, and domestic litigation.

The course combines a solid analysis of relevant technical legal aspects with a discussion of the bigger picture. The in-depth examination of topical regulatory and policy issues is set against the backdrop of an increasingly complex geopolitical and socioeconomic landscape. As students zoom in and out of the interconnected case studies, the course enables them to see the wood through the trees.

The course maps the evolution of the law and politics of climate change mitigation across four distinct conceptual ‘building blocks’. These are (i) Multilateralism and its pitfalls; (ii) Beyond multilateralism: the rise of environmental ‘leverage’; and (iii) Disrupting the trade and climate change mitigation nexus?; and (iv) Linkages: climate and food systems.

The bigger – geopolitical and socio-economic – picture emerges gradually throughout the analysis. The course is designed in such a way as to shine a light on the interconnections between the four conceptual ‘building blocks’ and between the circumscribed case studies under analysis throughout the course. This includes (i) a focus on the relationship between the shifting regulatory architecture of the UNFCCC treaty-based climate change law regime, normative disagreements surrounding burden-sharing in the fight against climate change, and the re-articulation of the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities; (ii) the relevant legal and policy implications in the context of domestic climate litigation; (iii) the failure of multilateralism and recourse to environmental ‘leverage’ via unilateral measures and plurilateral arrangements; (iv) the limits to environmental ‘leverage’, including an examination of ‘green protectionism’, ‘eco-imperialism’, and the re-interpretation of the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities in an evolving geopolitical and socio-economic landscape; and (v) the rise of inward-looking national security-centred approaches and their domino effect on environmental ‘leverage’.

2 hours of seminars in the Spring Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the WT.

• L. Rajamani, Differential Treatment in International Environmental Law (OUP, 2006), chapter 5.
• D. Bodansky and L. Rajamani, ‘The Paris Rulebook: Balancing International Prescriptiveness with National Discretion’ (2019) 69 International and Comparative Law Quarterly 1023.
• B. Mayer, ‘Temperature Targets and State Obligations on the Mitigation of Climate Change’ (2021) Journal of Environmental Law 1.
• G. Marin Duran and J. Scott, ‘Regulating Trade in Forest-Risk Commodities: Two Cheers for the European Union’ (2022) Journal of Environmental Law 1.
• G.C. Leonelli, ‘The Long and Winding Road Towards the Creation of Climate Clubs: Transatlantic Negotiations, Potential Regulatory Models and Challenges Ahead’ (2023) Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law 1.
• M. Bronckers and G. Gruni, ‘Retooling Sustainability Standards in EU Free Trade Agreements’ (2021) 24 Journal of International Economic Law 25.
• G.C. Leonelli, ‘Critical Raw Materials, the Net-Zero Transition and the 'Securitisation' of the Trade and Climate Change Nexus: Pinpointing Environmental Risks and Charting a New Path for Transnational Decarbonisation’ (forthcoming 2024) World Trade Review.
• A. Saab, Narratives of Hunger in International Law (CUP, 2019), chapter 1.

Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period