Handbook

In this course you will examine how climate change intersects with lawyering across public, private and community legal practice. It is increasingly recognised that all lawyers must take a climate conscious approach to their legal practice. Lawyers need to understand how climate change and its consequences are creating injustices, and altering responsibilities of business enterprises, financial institutions, governments, and society.

Drawing on the expertise of multiple teachers from across the Faculty, classes will cover a broad range of climate-related aspects of domestic and international law, and legal policy and justice issues connected to climate change. Topics may include:

• just transitions
  • energy transitions
  • climate impacts on lower socio-economic populations, elderly people and people living with disability
  • Indigenous lands, communities, science and research
  • ecocide, climate apartheid and victimisation of advocates
• responding to climate risks
  • climate mobility/displacement
  • sea-level rise and ocean acidification
  • loss and damage and adaptation
• mitigating climate impacts
  • carbon taxes and dividends
  • urban sustainability, planning and new economies
  • water, agricultural, ecosystems and their nexus with climate change
• legal innovations
  • duties of care
  • director’s duties, financial disclosures and institutional investors
  • climate litigation and human rights, children, and future generations
  • open research and sharing sustainable innovation

You will reflect on new and developing career pathways for climate conscious lawyers, and contrast the opportunities and challenges of incremental versus systemic legal changes in response to climate change.