Climate Change Law

This book brings together over seventy fifty authors for a comprehensive examination of the emerging global regime of climate change law. Despite the relative youth of climate change law, we can already begin to see the outlines of legal regimes addressing climate change mitigation and adaptation (and perhaps geo-engineering). As it has evolved, the system is a combination of top-down international frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and bottom-up efforts by national and subnational governments. This system is substantively linked to other areas of law such as energy regulation, water law, and land use law, while posing new issues to the whole body of law, including for public international law, constitutional law, and administrative law.

The book’s coverage includes both international law and developments in major legal systems such as the European Union, the United States, China, and India. Rather than delving into the details of each of these legal regimes, the emphasis is on disclosing scholarship on crosscutting regulatory approaches such as emissions trading and on pervasive concerns such as climate justice and the CBDR standard, as well as structural issues such as horizontal and vertical relationships between governments.