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 […]
Cross-cutting Issues
498 posts
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 […]
Zoning regulations have lately come under fire for making cities less dense and driving up the cost of new homes. State legislatures are increasingly responding by preempting aspects of local zoning authority. But despite its real problems, both now and historically, local zoning power remains an important tool among cities’ […]
One of the most fundamental questions in climate justice is also one of the most difficult to answer: how can the climate impacts of carbon dioxide emissions generated in one country be made legally sanctionable in another? Those most affected by climate change often lack access to effective remedies, while […]
Last week, Texas v. BlackRock (E.D. Tex.), the first antitrust case challenging climate collaborations by financial institutions, reached an initial resolution. Texas Attorney General (“AG”) Ken Paxton announced that one of three institutional-investor defendants, Vanguard, had settled. As part of the settlement, Vanguard pledged not to “direct” its portfolio companies’ […]
On January 29, 2026, a coalition of 27 state attorneys general, led by West Virginia Attorney General John B. McCuskey, sent a letter to the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) demanding immediate withdrawal of the “Reference Guide on Climate Science” from the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific […]