Climate Change on Trial: Mobilising Human Rights Litigation to Accelerate Climate Action

About the presentation:

This talk is based on a forthcoming book that tells the twenty-year socio-legal story of human rights-based climate (HRC) litigation. Based on an original database of the totality of HRC lawsuits around the world as well as interviews with leading actors and participant observation in the field, it explains the rise and global diffusion of HRC litigation as a form of climate governance. The book combines insights from global governance, international law, climate policy, human rights, and legal mobilisation theory in order to offer a sociolegal account of the actors, strategies, and norms that have emerged at the intersection of human rights and climate governance. By proposing a broad understanding of the impacts of legal mobilisation that includes direct and indirect, material and symbolic effects, it documents the contributions and shortcomings of human rights litigation in addressing the climate emergency. 

This event is co-hosted by Melbourne Climate Futures, the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, the Melbourne Law School Human Rights Program, and the Melbourne Centre for Law and the Environment. 

About the speaker: 

César Rodríguez-Garavito 

César Rodríguez-Garavito is Professor of Clinical Law and Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. He is the founding director of the Earth Rights Research & Action (TERRA) Clinic, the More-Than-Human Rights (MOTH) Program, the Climate Law Accelerator, and the Future of Rights and Governance (FORGE) Program at NYU Law. Professor Rodríguez-Garavito is a field lawyer and an Earth rights and human rights scholar whose work focuses on climate change, international environmental law, Indigenous peoples' rights and more-than-human rights. 
 
His recent publications include More-Than-Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing (NYU, ed.); Litigating the Climate Emergency: How Human Rights, Courts and Legal Mobilization Can Bolster Climate Action (Cambridge, ed.); “Human Rights 2030: Existential Challenges and a New Paradigm for the Field” (Oxford); "A Rights Turn in Biodiversity Litigation? (Transnational Environmental Law, coaut.) “Climatizing Human Rights: Economic and Social Rights for the Anthropocene” (Oxford).