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Sustainable Global Economic Law SGEL

Legal materiality of climate justice: a study of law in making

SGEL lecture

On Monday 21 March, Dr Hyo Yoon Kang, Reader in Law at Kent Law School, will be discussing her paper about the meaning of climate justice. Dr Kang argues that justice and climate are both abstract concepts. The meaning, therefore, of their composite, ‘climate justice’, is not clear. If the ‘parts’ (justice, climate) are moving and unstable concepts, how does law figure them ‘whole’ (climate justice)?
Date
21 March 2022
Time
15:30 -17:00
Please click here to read Dr Kang's paper What if all we can see are the parts, and there is not a whole: elements and manifestations of the making of law of 'climate justice'

Abstract

This essay discusses the meaning of 'climate justice' and the ways in which it is or is not materialized currently in climate change litigation. First I present the immateriality of the abstract concepts that make up this composite term: 'climate' and 'justice'. Yet the placing the words adjacent to one another seems to mobilise them into a novel composite vehicle of legal action. I trace how the idea of 'climate justice' hovers as an elusive idea around the concrete particularities of what can be known about 'climate' specifically in relation to 'justice'. These questions are probed in the setting and context of the Philippine Human Rights Commission's 2018 Inquiry into the Carbon Majors' (Chevron, Exxon, Shell, BP etc.) violation of human rights.

The aim here is mainly diagnostic: rather than taking legal doctrines of environmental or international human rights law as analytical materials, I use a legal materialist approach in order to try to make sense of what is concretely happening when an issue of a planetary scale of complexity is addressed and represented in a medium-sized moot court room. It helps to bring into vision the specific modes by which formats, places and media are enlisted as constitutive elements in the becoming and stabilisation of the emerging legal matter of climate justice. My analysis depicts law acting as the medium for upscaling (an idea of human justice) and downscaling (of climate science) different knowledges into other frameworks of reality than their original ones: to that of the human narrative scale.

Speaker

Dr Hyo Yoon Kang is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Law at Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK.  She holds a B.Sc. and LL.M. (Distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Ph.D. in Law from the European University Institute. She has published extensively on law and science, legal theory, and intellectual property law, especially on its interdisciplinary dimensions relating to its place within humanities, political economy and their historical and theoretical underpinnings. She serves on the Organizing Committee of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities and the Governing Board of the International Society for the History, Theory and Philosophy of Intellectual Property. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the journal Economy and Society.