Professor Stephen Humphreys

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time), MSc in Environmental Policy and Regulation, MSc in Environmental Policy, Technology and Health (Environmental Policy and Regulation) (LSE and Peking University), MSc in Human Rights and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places and demand is typically high. This may mean that you’re not able to get a place on this course.

This course covers international law in relation to climate change with a view to assessing how the harms and burdens associated with climate change are governed and allocated in different international law regimes. The course adopts the stance that the political and ethical questions raised by climate change cannot be addressed by reference to international environmental law alone. Climate change gives rise to a series of complexities touching upon a range of bodies of law (trade, human rights, migration, state responsibility) in a complex political and ethical environment. In approaching climate change as a concrete concern relevant to these various bodies of law and practice, the course will address the normative bases for choosing between actions designed to prevent and/or manage climate change and its consequences, given developmental imperatives and the concerns raised by the ‘fragmented’ nature of international law. Projected seminars include: climate change science, politics and ethics; the theory of international law; international environmental law; trade law; human rights law; migration law. The course includes two case studies, from among the following: technology transfer; carbon markets; food security.

This course will have two hours of teaching content each week in Winter Term. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

One 1,800 word essay to be submitted by the end of Week 6.

Good backgrounders are: IPCC, Sixth Assessment Report, Cambridge University Press (2021-22) (read at least the Summaries for Policymakers of the three Working Groups and of the Synthesis Report); IPCC, Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (2018).

Excellent for context: Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine (MIT Press, 2012); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (Verso, 2016); Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue (eds), Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, Oxford University Press (2010); Stephen Humphreys (ed.), Climate Change and Human Rights, Cambridge University Press (2010); Larry Lohmann, Carbon Trading, Dag Hammerskjöld Foundation (2006); Margaret Young (ed.), Regime Interaction in International Law: Facing Fragmentation, Cambridge UP (2012); Rosemary Rayfuse and Shirley Scott (eds), International Law in the Era of Climate Change, Edward Elgar (2011).

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.