Climate Circle
Climate and Law – Upheavals and Continuities
Climate change has become a legal issue. In the German context, the climate protection decision of the Federal Constitutional Court of March 2021 has revealed the necessary upheavals in the law. In the face of climate change, new legal thinking is required. But precisely because it cannot be situated outside the law, climate change is nothing new per se. There are already numerous regulations (including administrative practices) and case law on climate protection, climate adaptation, and climate finance. What is more, we can draw from knowledge resources both in the classical legal fields of constitutional, European, international, and administrative law as well as in established interdisciplinary contexts. Legal scholarship ought to build on this existing corpus when it addresses the topic of climate change.
The Climate Circle is dedicated to a discussion of this knowledge. The proposed project opens an interdisciplinary exchange on fundamental questions in the field of climate law; it unites scholars from diverse institutions. Its goal is to identify the interrelationship of climate and law and its contexts and to further develop existing legal discourses. Scholars from different fields of law and from an international background are invited with their already published texts to constructively discuss it in an institutionally diverse context. Every third time and, thus, one time per term, the Climate Circle opens the possibility to present a not yet published work-in-progress paper; it thereby allows for younger scholars to exchange about the research projects. Attendance to the climate circle will be open to all interested parties from the disciplines concerned. The Climate Circle will be held online.
The discussion format follows a variation of the “critical friends’ method”[1]: a person invited in advance presents the text of an equally invited author in a first interval. She adopts a benevolent critical attitude towards the text and, as a “critical friend”, outlines possible points for discussion during the first ten minutes. This introductory part is followed by a joint, moderated discussion round that begins with queries to the “critical friend” and finally addresses the critical points. At least 45 minutes are foreseen for this discussion. Neither the “critical friend” nor the author participates in the discussion. At the end of the discussion a statement of five to ten minutes belongs to the author. Finally, the “critical friend” gives a summary after the discussion, which can be read as feedback to the group. The moderator closes the session, linking it to the subsequent climate circle. This method has been developed for the present purposes; it aims at benevolent atmosphere for critical exchange of the questions underlying the presented project: on the one hand, the format makes it possible to discuss basic research and to illuminate it in the light of climate change; on the other hand, scholarly contributions on climate law can be discussed in terms of their significance for other areas of law.
For its third session, in March 2024, the Climate Circle invites young scholars to present their own paper on the topic of “Procedure v. Substance in Harm Prevention?” for discussion; work-in-progress papers are expressly welcome. The Call for Papers with more information can be found here.
[1] The Critical Friends‘ Method was developed for feedback among colleagues.
Next Session:
12 March 2024, 7 pm, Zoom: "Civil society participation and the question of legitimacy at the UNFCCC: the case of the Women and Gender Constituency" mit Hannah Birkenkötter und Birgit Peter. Cllick here to access the text.