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 […]
Climate Litigation
330 posts
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court granted three fossil fuel companies’ petition for a writ of certiorari seeking review of the Colorado Supreme Court’s opinion allowing the County Commissioners of Boulder County and the City of Boulder (together, Boulder) to proceed with their state-law claims that the companies are liable for […]
The explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and digital services has brought renewed attention to the physical infrastructure underpinning the digital economy: data centers. While critical to the operations of major tech companies, data centers are now among the most energy-intensive forms of industrial infrastructure. Although it is […]