Foreword

Climate change is one of the planetary crises challenging the law, legal practice and the legal system. Climate change prompts not only legal development, the normal evolution of the law in response to a changing society, but also legal disruption. Legal disruption occurs when problems cannot be managed using existing laws and legal institutions, thereby necessitating change. In short, climate change is legally disruptive.

Conversely, the law, legal practice and the legal system are implicated in climate change. Climate change is an externality of a socio-economic system that is built on the commodification and exploitation of Earth’s natural resources. The law and legal institutions enable and encourage that socio-economic system and hence the environmental externalities. In short, the law is environmentally disruptive.

Law students of today will be practising during the time when urgent action to address climate change needs to be taken. To hold the global average temperature increase to no more than 2 °C, and preferably 1.5 °C, above pre-industrial levels by 2050 – the targets set under the Paris Agreement – our socio-economic system, including aspects of modes of production, need to be transformed radically to achieve the needed energy transition.

That energy transition is required not only to achieve ecological sustainability – a liveable planet – but also environmental justice for all people. Climate change is a cause of injustice in so many ways. One way is that the people who have contributed the least to climate change suffer the most. The law enables and ensures this distributive injustice. But taking the transformative action required to tackle climate change can itself cause injustice. The energy transition must also be just, not redistributing injustice between different groups in society.

To equip law students with the knowledge and skills to practice law in a climate-transformed world, legal education needs to teach them about the legal disruption of climate change and the environmental disruption of the law and how to justly address both. This demands a transformation in legal education by mainstreaming climate change in all aspects of the legal curriculum. This transformation entails a journey into uncharted territory. A map is required to navigate the journey. This book provides the map.

Edited by Julia Dehm, Nicole Graham and Zoe Nay, this book is a valuable collection addressing the core legal curriculum – the 11 compulsory academic areas of knowledge known as the Priestley 11 – and a range of elective subjects taught at Australian law schools. The chapters identify, first, the legal disruptions and developments that climate change is causing to these areas of substantive and adjective law; second, why and how climate change is causing these disruptions and developments; and third, what and how legal change can and should be made to achieve sustainability for the planet and justice for all its people.

The book provides the map for the journey; it is our task to follow it.

Justice Brian Preston
Chief Judge of Land and Environment Court of NSW