Prof Cinnamon Carlarne – Climate Courage: Reimagining the Promise and Possibilities of Climate Law
Friday 12 March 2.00 - 3.00pm
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Abstract
Climate change is profoundly reshaping our world in deeply differentiated ways. Within this vortex, efforts to respond to climate change have the potential to simultaneously limit the negative effects of climate change and fundamentally reshape existing social, political, and economic relationships in line with parallel social movements focused on gender, racial, and income equality, among others. Climate change, thus, poses both an existential challenge and an unprecedented opportunity to envision and move towards a different kind of world. A world where the rule of law reflects deeper notions of equality among and between humans and the natural world. This vision for society, and for the role of the rule of law in society, is being advocated and advanced in varying forms around the world.
Despite these burgeoning efforts, the pathway that we will take and the role of the rule of law in addressing climate change remains indeterminate. Even as the urgency of the challenge crystalizes, legal and political strategies remain piecemeal and fragmented. In the political hallways where the rule of law is fashioned and re-fashioned, the debates remain, by and large, conventional. Conversations focus on questions of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade regimes, bridge fuels and nuclear lifespans. Outside the hallways of power, however, different conversations are taking place; different voices are being raised; different visions of the rule of law are being advanced. At their core, these visions seek to harness the rule of law as a tool not merely for sustaining the norm, but rather for engaging inevitable disruption as an opportunity to reimagine and reconfigure the world. This article centers and engages these visions.
About Prof Carlarne
Professor Cinnamon Carlarne is the Associate Dean for Faculty & Intellectual Life and the Alumni Society Designated Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University. Carlarne’s scholarship focuses on the evolution of system of domestic and international environmental law and includes a book on comparative climate change law and policy with Oxford University Press; a Foundation Press text on climate law; a West casebook on International Environmental Law; the Oxford Handbook of International Climate Change Law; a series of journal articles and book chapters exploring questions of domestic and international environmental law; and a textbook on oceans and human health. She is currently working on a new book about the future of climate law, titled Climate Courage. She is on the editorial board for Transnational Environmental Law (Cambridge University Press) and the academic advisory board for Climate Law (IOS Press). Carlarne earned her BCL (law) and an MSc in Environmental Change and Management from the University of Oxford; a JD from Berkeley Law; and her BA from Baylor University. Prior to joining the Moritz College of Law, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and the Harold Woods Fellow in Environmental Law at Wadham College, Oxford. Prior to entering academia, she was an associate attorney at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.