Browse Hierarchy LAW4201: Legal Struggles for Climate Justice

This module explores how law interprets and processes conflicts over environmental and climate justice. It draws upon literature spanning law, green criminology, and social control to explore the differentiated forms of law and criminalisation that apply to environmental defenders and powerful organisations. The main aim of this module will be to provide students with an understanding of how power shapes legal outcomes in environmental conflicts. The first half of the module will look at issues of criminalisation in the context of climate justice, covering the following topics: -The social and legal construction of environmental crimes (examining debates over what can be understood as a crime and who can be held responsible for environmental harms) -Proposals for establishing a new international crime of 'ecocide' (examining the legal history of the concept of 'ecocide' and the role of social movements in shifting political and legal landscapes toward the criminalisation of environmentally destructive behaviours) -Green criminology theories and approaches for understanding environmental crimes (examining how such approaches tend to go beyond law in analysing the generation and control of environmental crimes) -Criminalisation of environmental defenders (examining the state's use of criminal law and other techniques to stigmatise, control, and criminalise socio-environmental struggles) -The relationship between social mobilisation and criminalisation (examining how these processes relate and shape each other) The second half of the module will dig deeper into specific issues of law that relate to struggles for climate justice. In this part of the module, each seminar will examine a specific legal case, which will be used to draw out one or more of the key theoretical issues raised by the case. The following are some examples of case studies to be discussed: - the Colombian Constitutional Court's ruling about the Atrato river basin (examining issues of legal personhood, colonialism, and legal recognition) - a Peruvian farmer's lawsuit against the German energy giant RWE (examining questions about the concept of territoriality and global states (in the plural) - other cases that shed light on how law frames what can count as a struggle for climate justice