| Climate Change Law and Policy

Climate change, like a lot of other problems in the modern world, is shaped by challenges  that are increasingly non-linear, unpredictable, messy and context-dependent. The effects  of climate change are decidedly non-linear and difficult to forecast. While, there are no  guaranteed responses and those proposed so far are complex, context-dependent, and in  most cases very disputed.

Climate change has emerged as a serious problem that challenges both our  informal systems for regulating behavior (e.g., ethics) and our formal systems  of governance (e.g., law).

The law of climate change involves a wide gamut of issues that go well beyond the confines  a legal framework. In order to be prepared for and resilient to the changes in the legal issues  surrounding climate change, a lawyer needs to be well versed in the complex and multi level governance system applying to climate change. This interdisciplinary course integrates economic, ethical and political dimensions of climate change in order to provide  a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding climate change law and policy.

With readings drawn from law, philosophy, and political economy, the purpose of this  course will be to examine the evolution of international climate change law and to consider  the arguments about the appropriate scope and limits of climate action. Students will learn  how considerations from various disciplines; such as natural science, economics, law and  political science; shape international and national, public and private, responses to the  problem of climate change. They will learn the historical and political context of climate  treaties, as well as understand the evolution of domestic climate policymaking in India.

This course will follow a combination of lecture and seminar-style discussion, including a  group policy exercise. The capstone experience in this course will be two sessions on design  thinking that will provide students with the necessary tools and knowledge to apply  human-centered design principles to solving policy problems. Through a case study of  electric vehicles in India, these sessions will integrate the course’s key learnings and  encourage students to develop their policy solutions for the problem at hand. The final  student output (group work) will be policy recommendations aimed at government  officials.