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.
Global Legal Pluralism
Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines - comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law - have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism - the definition of law, the role of the state, of community, and of space - are altered under conditions of globalization. It addresses interrelations between different legal orders and various ways, both theoretical and practical, to deal with them. And it provides an outlook on the future of global legal pluralism as theory and practice of global law.
In-services and empty threats: The roles of organizational practices and workplace experiences in shaping U.S. educators' understandings of students' rights.
This paper applies theoretical frameworks from organizational sociology and sociolegal studies to examine factors associated with educators' conceptions of students' rights to due process in disciplinary actions. We analyze a unique representative data set of 402 teachers and 200 administrators in U.S. high schools to investigate how educators understand the rights to due process articulated in the Supreme Court case of Goss v. Lopez (1975). We then examine whether individual characteristics and participation in organizational processes are associated with educators' understandings of students' due process rights. Findings suggest that educators' understandings of students' entitlements to due process vary with educators' level of education, experience of school-related legal threats, and participation in district or diocese in-service training programs on students' rights. Results point to organizational climate as a key factor in shaping educators' rights conceptions and the role of law in American schools.