Each month, Arnold & Porter and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law collect and summarize developments in climate-related litigation, which we also add to our U.S. and non-U.S. climate litigation charts. If you know of any cases we have missed, please email us at columbiaclimate at gmail dot com. HERE ARE THE ADDITIONS […]
Climate Litigation
312 posts
By Jessica Wentz On December 20, the City of Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz County filed separate lawsuits in California Superior Court seeking to hold 29 fossil fuel companies accountable for their contribution to climate change. In doing so, they joined five other Californian local governments that have filed similar […]
By Dena Adler On November 21, 2017, the High Court of Ireland blocked a climate change case concerning construction of a new airport runway from moving forward, but made a groundbreaking decision in recognizing “a personal constitutional right to an environment” for the first time. In Friends of the Irish […]
By Michael Burger On Monday, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear oral arguments in Juliana v. United States. The argument will be live streamed here, at 1 pm EST/10 am PST. Below, I flag four key issues that may figure (more […]
By Dr. Will Frank [1] Editor’s note: Lluiya v. RWE, now pending in the courts of Germany, is a noteworthy litigation concerning the potential liability of greenhouse gas emitters for the damages caused by climate change. The blog below presents an analysis of the case from the point of view of a […]
by Justin Gundlach We know that burning fossil fuels is the main cause of anthropogenic climate change, and that climate change is the source of adverse impacts on communities and even regional and national economies. Those impacts—sometimes irksome, sometimes devastating—are increasingly obvious, and the causal mechanisms that connect them to […]
On September 14, the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division II, ruled that a trial court decision to release climate scientists’ emails had improperly ignored an Arizona statutory protection for university records. In this case, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (“E&E Legal”) has been attempting to use open records laws […]
By Dena Adler It has been widely reported that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma inundated industrial plants, wastewater treatment plants, and Superfund sites, causing a stew of toxic chemicals and sewage to leak into floodwaters and releasing almost 1 million pounds of seven deadly pollutants into the air. The Union of […]