How Climate Justice Framings Should Affect Environmental Law: The Case for Establishing an Environmental Court of Justice

Lead Research Organisation: University of Bristol
Department Name: Politics

Abstract

My primary research question is whether a case can be made for the establishment of an Environmental Court of Justice through the use of climate
justice framings. Climate change presents many challenges to the international order and all the actors and institutions in it, and I believe the
current response has been inadequate to deal with those challenges. The state-centric approach that continues to dominate the international legal
order often dismisses climate justice because of the assumption that climate change burdens will never been evenly distributed across sovereign
borders and therefore is of less importance. However, the inherent inequalities present both in the international system broadly but also in the
specific context of climate change action illustrates why there is the need for a questioning and potential restructuring of the international order,
and especially the legal order governing the international system. Through a normative theory approach utilising qualitative methods like
discourse analysis I am to assess whether climate justice framings can be used to make a case for the establishment of an Environmental Court of
Justice. I suggest that that a case could be made if it was used as an opportunity to establish a multilevel legal governance body that presented a
novel approach to issues of climate justice.

Publications

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Studentship Projects

Project Reference Relationship Related To Start End Student Name
ES/P000630/1 01/10/2017 30/09/2027
2094702 Studentship ES/P000630/1 01/10/2018 01/10/2022 Eleanor Wolff