Climate Change & Private Law Conference

Ordinarily, legal scholars understand and address the challenges of climate change through public law lenses such as constitutional, human rights, and regulatory law. But climate change also will both impact and be impacted by private law fields such as contract, torts, and property. This conference brings together experts from around the world to workshop their contributions to a forthcoming volume, The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Private Law (edited by Douglas Kysar and Ernest Lim), which will offer the first ever comprehensive scholarly assessment of the implications of climate change for private law. Spanning 46 chapters and drawing on the expertise of 61 authors from 44 global institutions, this volume will explore the ways in which climate change implicates all areas of law, not just those expressly designed to address it. 

The Climate Change and Private Law conference will bring most of these authors to New Haven for a two-day public workshop in which chapter authors will present their working drafts, followed by expert commentary and audience engagement.

Registration

To attend, please register at this link³. Registration is required for all non-YLS attendees and strongly encouraged for YLS community members.

The conference will take place from 9:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. on April 11 and 12, 2025, in the Sterling Law Building, 127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT.

For a detailed conference agenda, click here⁴.

For a collection of participant biographies, click here⁵.

Sponsored by the Yale Law School Center for Private Law and the Law, Environment, and Animals Program at Yale Law School, with funding support from the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School and the EW Barker Centre for Law & Business at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore.