What Do Law Students Choose to Study When Given the Freedom to Explore Climate Change Law?
One of the most rewarding aspects of teaching is discovering which questions students consider most important when given the opportunity to explore complex legal challenges on their own.
Over the course of this semester in my Climate Change Law course at the University of Tulsa College of Law, twenty students worked in teams of five to develop two rounds of collaborative research presentations on topics of their own choosing.
The course itself was structured around weekly doctrinal modules examining how climate change intersects with different areas of law, including international law, torts, contracts, property, civil procedure, constitutional law, administrative law, legislation, federal courts, corporate governance, energy law, environmental justice, and technology governance.
Students were given substantial freedom to identify the questions they found most compelling, develop their own legal frameworks, and examine how climate change interacts with broader challenges of governance, institutional design, justice, and accountability. This approach allowed them to connect climate change to the legal questions they found most compelling while grounding their analysis in specific legal doctrines, institutions, and governance structures and to think critically about how law operates in addressing complex and evolving societal problems.
Looking across the presentations, I was very happy for the remarkable breadth of topics they selected.
During the first round of presentations, students explored:
• Global climate governance, equity, and the Paris Agreement
• Technology, artificial intelligence, and the climate cost of innovation
• Environmental racism and climate vulnerability
• Climate change litigation and tort law
In the second round, they turned to questions involving:
• Constitutional law, war powers, and the climate implications of military action
• Wildfires, standing, causation, and the barriers to climate accountability in court
• Policing, prisons, constitutional rights, and climate justice
• The Inflation Reduction Act, federalism, and interstate competition for clean-energy investment
What emerged from these discussions was a powerful reminder that climate change is rarely just an environmental issue.
Students approached climate change through the lenses of:
• Constitutional Law
• Civil Procedure
• Federal Courts
• Administrative Law
• Tort Law
• Property Law
• Federalism
• Environmental Justice
• Technology Governance
• International Law and Global Governance
Perhaps most interestingly, many of the presentations focused not on whether climate harms exist, but on questions of institutions, authority, accountability, and legal design:
- Who bears the burden of climate change?
- Who has standing to challenge climate harms?
- Which institutions are responsible for responding?
- What happens when significant harms exist but legal remedies remain limited?
- How should law allocate risks in a rapidly changing world?
These are precisely the kinds of questions that make climate change law such a dynamic and interdisciplinary field of study.
I am grateful for the seriousness, creativity, and intellectual curiosity demonstrated by all four groups throughout the semester. Their work reflects not only the growing complexity of climate law, but also the increasingly important role that future lawyers will play in addressing some of the most challenging governance questions of our time.
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Paolo Davide Farah, Paolo Farah