The Case for Climate Change

Douglas Kysar, Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law, and coeditor Jolene Lin of the National University of Singapore released their new book, Climate Change Litigation in the Asia Pacific (Cambridge University Press), the first academic examination of climate change litigation in the Asia Pacific region. The book explores with deep insights how legal practice, especially litigation, mobilizes organizations and communities in the world’s most populous region around climate action and, specifically, decarbonization.

Kysar and Lin open by claiming that “any plausible solution to the world’s growing climate crisis will need to take root in the Asia Pacific region,” and sets the stage for the book’s argument. In fourteen chapters, the editors collected information from the co-organized international research workshop held in June 2018 between the Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law (APCEL), which Lin directs, and Yale Law School. The workshop aimed to explore the state of climate change litigation in the Asia Pacific region. By bringing together both established and emerging legal academics and practitioners from the Global North and South, attendees sought to examine the galvanizing power of litigation for countries like Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and beyond. The book provides an in-depth analysis of case studies dealing with climate change litigation in select jurisdictions in the Asia Pacific region. It also features a section on China’s climate change litigation, as well as a rich academic analysis in understandable prose pulled from a wide range of perspectives in the involved legal community.

Professor Douglas Kysar is the Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the faculty codirector of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program (LEAP), an interdisciplinary think-and-do tank dedicated to grappling with the deep questions raised by human-animal relationships and industrialized animal cruelty, and to seeking positive legal and political change for animals, people, and the environment upon which they depend. Kysar’s academic and research interests pull from areas such as torts, animal law, climate change, products liability, and risk regulation.