Professor Douglas Kysar Co-Edits First Comprehensive Survey of the Implications of Climate Change for Private Law

As climate change has become increasingly severe, scholars have generally looked to public law fields like constitutional and regulatory law to understand its implications and propose measures to mitigate it. 

“The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Private Law,” edited by Douglas Kysar and Ernest Lim, shifts that focus to private law, offering an analysis of how that sector should address and respond to climate change. Across 46 chapters, the book describes the impacts climate change has on private law, surveying implications for core subjects like property, contract, and tort law, as well as emerging issues from artificial intelligence to the horizontal effect of human rights.

The book “seeks to offer the first ever comprehensive scholarly assessment of the implications of climate change for private law and vice versa,” Kysar and Lim write. Kysar and Lim assembled a group of experts from around the world to examine the relationship between private law and climate change, including “how existing private law can respond to the drivers and impacts of climate change, and whether private law itself might be impacted by climate change in addition to being called to address it.”

On July 15, 2026, the book was featured in a launch event hosted by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. The event was chaired by the Right Honorable Lord Philip James Sales, Justice and Deputy President of the U.K. Supreme Court, and featured commentary by several distinguished speakers. In Justice Sales’s opening remarks, he posed the broad question, “What is the rule of law going to mean in a climate change world?”, and called for “a huge collaborative effort to adjust to the new reality, on the part of academics, practitioners, and judges.”

The handbook’s co-editors agree: “The task before us is not merely to adapt existing legal frameworks to accommodate climate realities, but to also envision a new private law that embraces uncertainty, experiments with hybrid forms of responsibility, and remains open to learning from the more-than-human world. Only then can private law effectively address climate change,” Kysar and Lim write. 

Douglas Kysar is the Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School as well as the faculty director of the Law, Environment and Animals Program. He is a legal expert in torts, environmental law, climate change, animal law, products liability, and risk regulation. 

Ernest Lim is the Chan Sek Keong Professor of Private Law and a vice dean at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. His research expertise in comparative corporate governance and private law addresses critical global challenges, including sustainability and artificial intelligence.