Climate change litigation: Sharma, Smith and beyond

Thursday 5 May 2022

With the challenge of climate change taking on an ever-increasing sense of immediacy, and a growing concern that governments and corporations have been too slow to act, citizens are turning to the courts for relief. In this seminar leading experts in civil liability, public law and environmental law considered recent important decisions from the courts in Australia, New Zealand and comparable jurisdictions, discussed the prospects and limits of climate change litigation, and sought to place litigation in the context of other possible regulatory responses to climate change.

Professor Jason Varuhas (University of Melbourne) considered the Full Federal Court of Australia’s decision in Minister for the Environment v Sharma, in which a group of children argued a Government Minister owed them a duty to take reasonable steps to avoid exacerbating risks of climate change. Professor Geoff McLay (Victoria University of Wellington) considered the forthcoming New Zealand Supreme Court case of Smith v Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd, in which the plaintiff, an Indigenous elder, seeks to establish that a corporation owes a duty of care in relation to climate. Professor Liz Fisher (University of Oxford) offered reflections on the turn to litigation, and place emerging legal trends in broader perspective, addressing the topic of ‘Climate Change, Accountability, and Adjudication’.

This webinar was delivered as part of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies Global Public Law Seminar Series.

About the panel

Jason Varuhas is Professor of Law at Melbourne Law School, where he is also Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies. His interests span administrative law, human rights law, private law, and the law of remedies. He has published eight books, including his prize-winning monograph, Damages and Human Rights (Hart 2016), and most recently, Balkin and Davis Law of Torts (LexisNexis 2021). He has published articles in leading journals such as the Law Quarterly Review, Cambridge Law Journal, Modern Law Review, and Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. His scholarly work has been cited by courts in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland. He is the Director of the Public Law Conference, the leading international conference series on public law in the common law world.

Liz Fisher is Professor of Environmental Law at Corpus Christi College and the Faculty of Law. Her 2007 book, Risk Regulation and Administrative Constitutionalism, won the SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2008. Other publications include Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2017) and Fisher, Lange and Scotford, Environmental Law: Text, Cases and Materials (2nd ed, OUP 2019). Elizabeth Fisher and Sidney Shapiro, Administrative Competence: Reimagining Administrative Law (CUP 2020) was jointly awarded the American Bar Association Administrative Law Section’s Scholarship Award 2021. She is General Editor of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and served as General Editor of the Journal of Environmental Law (2013-22). She has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for 2022-25 for a project exploring legal imagination and environmental law.

Geoff McLay is Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington, where he has taught since 1995. He served as a Law Commissioner between 2010 and 2015, and as the chair of the Legislation Design Advisory Committee’s external subcommittee until 2019. He is also the editor of the New Zealand Law Reports. In 2006 he was the New Zealand Law Foundation International Research Fellow. At Victoria University of Wellington Geoff has taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses including torts, advanced torts, intellectual property, competition (antitrust) law, comparative constitutional law, and ethics. He has published a wide range of articles in these areas.

^{Photo by Olena Bohovyk on Unsplash}