Climate Governance Beyond Environmental Law
Climate governance increasingly emerges through legal fields that are not traditionally viewed as environmental law.
This insight became particularly clear through two student presentations in my Climate Change Law course at the University of Tulsa College of Law.
One group examined recent U.S. military action in Iran through the lenses of war powers, separation of powers, administrative law, international law, energy security, and military emissions. Their presentation raised important questions about how existing legal frameworks address, or fail to address, the climate consequences of geopolitical conflict and disruptions to global fossil-fuel systems.
Another group explored how the Inflation Reduction Act is reshaping federalism and interstate competition for clean-energy investment. Their analysis engaged with the Spending Clause, anti-commandeering doctrine, Dormant Commerce Clause principles, competitive federalism, and the incentives created by contemporary climate legislation.
Although these topics initially appear unrelated, both presentations highlighted a common theme: climate governance increasingly operates through constitutional structures, institutional design, and governance mechanisms rather than environmental statutes alone.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons emerging from climate law today is that understanding climate change requires understanding how institutions allocate authority, distribute responsibility, and structure decision-making across multiple levels of governance.
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.
Another particularly rewarding aspect of the course was the collaborative process through which many of these projects evolved. Students were encouraged to develop their own research questions while receiving individualized feedback on topic selection, research design, structure, and presentation strategy. Through this iterative exchange, many refined their initial ideas, sharpened their analytical focus, strengthened their legal arguments, and connected their topics more effectively to broader debates in climate change law. The final presentations therefore reflected not only the students’ creativity and initiative, but also a process of co-production of knowledge in which dialogue, mentoring, and critical engagement helped transform preliminary interests into more sophisticated and rigorous research projects.
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Paolo Davide Farah, Paolo Farah