The Stanford Environmental Law Journal and the Stanford Journal of International Law will host a one-day symposium on February 24, 2007 on legal responses to global climate change.  The symposium will bring together individuals who have experience with innovative approaches to climate change liability and provide them a forum to present and deliberate new legal strategies and, most importantly, produce creative scholarship that can be applied in future litigation as well as other legal arenas.  The focus will not be on rehashing past accomplishments but on building the groundwork for new achievements. The final output of the symposium will be a special issue published jointly by the Stanford Environmental Law Journal and the Stanford Journal of International Law and distributed to their subscribers, as well as symposium participants and attendees. We expect this compilation to serve as a valuable new resource for scholars and practitioners alike.

 

 

Although the negative implications of human-driven climate change are increasingly well understood by the scientific community, the legal discussion to date has focused largely on the allocation of responsibility for mitigating and avoiding changes to the global environment. In this symposium we will explore legal responses to climate changes that have already occurred, are unavoidable as a result of past actions, or are likely based upon projected future trends and behaviors. Specifically, the symposium will coordinate perspectives from academics and practitioners on issues pertaining to the allocation of liability for greenhouse gas emissions. This discussion will focus on three principal areas of current debate in both domestic and international legal contexts: 1) tort and other common law liability; 2) risk allocation through insurance and reinsurance; and 3) protections from the negative consequences of climate change afforded indigenous groups by international human rights regimes.

 

 

First, we will address the potential for successful tort and other common law actions against greenhouse gas emitters, and the barriers to the successful prosecution of such actions in courts of law.  We will also explore the potential influence of tort claimants on the political and regulatory landscape.  For instance, legal scholars, practitioners, and advocates have drawn parallels between claims based on human-caused climate change and successful litigation involving DES, lead pigment, tobacco, and asbestos.  The symposium will explore the validity of these parallels, and will consider the applicability of theories of probabilistic harm and collective liability, and the relative efficacy of a piecemeal approach versus global approaches to the establishment of liability.

 

 

Second, we will explore the ramifications of climate change on the allocation of risk through the insurance and reinsurance industries. Medicine, real estate, transportation safety, and drug testing are just a few of the industries whose contours have been shaped via policies implemented through insurance schemes. Climate change science is being followed closely by the reinsurance industry, and modeling the impacts of changing climate is now a new research priority among several of the world’s largest reinsurance firms. As businesses face new risks as a result of climate change, the allocation of costs associated with these risks will require modified legal and business relationships between insurers and their corporate clients.  The symposium will explore the future of these relationships.  

 

 

Third, we will consider the legal and political ramifications of human rights claims brought by indigenous groups that have been, or expect to be, adversely affected by human-caused climate change.  We will discuss the tenability of these claims and impediments to their success, as well as their potential influence on international relations, transnational legal regimes, and international civil proceedings.