Nick Scott, Harj Narulla, Nicholas Young, Michael Burger, Harro van Asselt, Jessica Wentz and Maria Antonia Tigre In May, the High Court of Australia (HCA) will hear MACH Energy Australia v Denman Aberdeen Muswellbrook Scone Healthy Environment Group & Anor (“Denman”), the first climate case to reach Australia’s apex court. […]
Cross-cutting Issues
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Earlier this week, on April 21, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts enjoined five secretarial orders issued by the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) and U.S. Army Corps (“USACE”) that collectively imposed sweeping constraints on wind and solar development across the United States. The Sabin Center’s […]
Introduction As a British judge with a special interest in environmental law, I have over the last two decades taken a particular interest in the developing role of the courts across the world in response to the challenges of climate change. In this article I shall look back at my […]
On May 2, 2025, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR) received a formal petition requesting an advisory opinion on the human rights obligations of African States in relation to the climate change crisis. The petition before the AfCHPR details a continent already experiencing widespread and severe impacts […]
The number of climate change lawsuits brought before domestic, regional, and international courts is growing at an unprecedented pace, with courts increasingly being asked to hold governments and corporations accountable for the harms associated with our warming planet. Most of the focus in the scholarship so far has been on whether such […]
The number of court decisions upholding building decarbonization laws against federal preemption challenges is growing. After the Ninth Circuit’s decision in California Restaurant Association v. City of Berkeley (Berkeley), building decarbonization laws effectively prohibiting fossil-fuel appliances covered by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (EPCA) appeared to be […]
Corporate coordination to mitigate climate change raises complex questions for competition policy. From a structural antitrust perspective, climate alliances comprised of large asset managers can raise the specter of unaccountable “private governance,” if effectively imposing clean-energy restraints across an entire sector. But from an econometric perspective, which seeks to optimize […]
Carbon dioxide removal (“CDR”) has become increasingly vital to prevent catastrophic climate change. Even with aggressive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will remain elevated for centuries, continuing to warm the planet and intensify climate impacts. By actively removing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, CDR […]