Exploring the Landscape of Climate Law and Scholarship: Two Emerging Trends
Exploring the landscape of climate law, this chapter identifies two emerging trends increasingly visible in climate law scholarship. The first relates to the multi-layered nature of climate law. Here, the chapter argues that our understanding of the complex web of legal norms that address climate change necessitates research that also takes into consideration interactions between various sources of legal authority in regulating climate change, including their hierarchies, synergies and tensions. In addition to benefitting those implementing climate law on the ground, such an approach makes it possible to analyse the global implications of climate law, including its effectiveness and the mutual supportiveness of its various layers. The second relates to deformalization of climate law; the expanding role of non-state actors, soft law instruments and informal collaboration in global efforts to address climate change. While climate law scholarship is increasingly paying attention to this phenomenon, this chapter argues that accounting for the role of non-state actors and voluntary regulatory initiatives involves some important doctrinal challenges, including how to avoid becoming overtly descriptive and retain a normative focus.
A critical analysis of the Kyoto protocol's second commitment period.
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Globalization, State Law and Legal Pluralism in Brazil
AbstractGlobalization has had an immense impact on traditional political concepts such as sovereignty. This paper argues that the modern nation-state is no longer the principal form of political rule across the globe and that legal pluralism could be on the rise. In South America, as globalization diminishes the size and burdens of traditional nation-states, legal pluralism seems to reappear in order to fill normative spaces that are left empty. This seems to happen, thanks to the new shape of a minimal state, as a result of a new world order. Legal pluralism can also represent a cluster of alternatives against the normative destruction that globalization has effected in the world’s legal cultures. Conflict between institutions in a worldwide trade of cultural values suggests the victory of the stronger. A sort of social Darwinism has been in operation and the weakest partners in today’s globalized world are facing the implementation of new forms of conflict compositions. Because there is a weak and minim...