This program contains 1 hour of Professionalism Content
---
Climate change is with us. This part will explore how it will change what we do as lawyers, judges and legal educators, and how we do it. Does the existential threat require a reconsideration of legal ethics? What are the ethics of climate change lawyering? What is the relationship between lawyering and civil disobedience? How do we think about legal standing and who gets to be represented? What types of strategies are likely to be successful in raising concerns about climate change?
CHAIR: Brian Langille
Andrew Green & Albert Yoon, “The Most Dangerous Branch”
Climate change has the potential to alter many landscapes including the ground under the main institutions of government. This paper examines the shifting role of supreme courts and the implications for their role in assessing climate policy. It focuses on the dividing lines between the courts, the legislature and the executive primarily through two recent cases: the US Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v EPA and the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act. We look at the how the balance is being changed between expertise, political accountability, and legality through doctrines around deference and the limits of judicial review.
Cheryl Milne, “Vulnerable Litigants and Radical Lawyering”
Given the urgency of climate change and its impact of young people into the future, some climate change advocacy groups representing children and youth have launched court challenges around the world, advancing arguments that risk little chance of success given the complexity of the cases and the innovative legal foundations for the claims. While one aim is to draw attention to the issue, are these cases ethically suspect? What are the ethical issues that lawyers need to consider when representing children who participate as test case litigants? A network of practitioners and lawyers are currently exploring the key principles that should guide child rights strategic litigation more generally, including how to meaningfully engage children in advocacy in a rights-respecting manner. While it might be argued that the climate crisis warrants radical tactics, this paper will explore the legal and ethical issues involved in radical lawyering for vulnerable litigants as a response to the existential crisis that is climate change.
Abdi Aidid, “Ethical Lawyering and Existential Threats"
Lawyers are deeply implicated in the climate crisis, yet the mechanisms we have for regulating lawyer behaviour - legal ethics regimes - are conspicuously absent from discussions about appropriate responses to global warming’s existential threat. To that end, this paper considers two questions. First, I ask whether legal ethics regimes (i.e. its rules and institutions) can play a role in responding to the climate crisis. I explain that because of lawyers’ involvement in everything from abetting corporate carbon emissions to pursuing climate justice to drafting legislation, legal-ethical rules are an underexplored lever for climate interventions. Second, I ask whether the discipline of legal ethics is capable of responding to challenges on the scale of the ongoing climate crisis. Here, I argue that challenges of an existential nature should motivate a reconsideration of some of legal ethics’ more narrow and provincial frameworks, namely the centrality of the lawyer-client relationship and the constraint of jurisdiction.
Негізгі бет Panel 4 - Lawyering in Times of Climate Change
Пікірлер