Abstract

Legal theory has always considered the historical relationship between climate and law under four perspectives: the influence of climate on political regimes, the social dependence of organizations and regulations on the types of energy used, the emergence of the issue of environmental sustainability due to the exploitation of nature, the conditioning of energy production systems on the legal qualification of space, and other legal categories (section “The Historical Relationship Between Climate, Natural Resources, and Law”). With the recent climate emergency, new challenges have arisen. The first concerns the planetary space of the emergency. In particular, the problem arises on two fronts: the relationship between the definition of the space of the climate system and the spatial concepts of individual legal systems (section “The Climate System in Legal Theory”), and the relationship between state sovereignty over natural resources and the planetary scope of climate stability (section “State Sovereignty and “Planetary Boundaries”). However, the climate emergency is also urgent and a matter of time. This situation undermines the linear representation of legal processes (section “Tragedy of the Horizon and Metabolic Rift”). Unprecedented scenarios open in discourses on human rights, which foreshadow the emergence of a human right to a stable and safe climate (section “Climate Change and Human Rights”), and on democracy, whose deliberative and representative functions turn out to be dysfunctional for the times and space of the climate emergency (section “Climate Change and Democracy”). The most recent legal practices try to react to these difficulties in three ways: through the so-called climate change litigations strategies, by embedding the rights of nature in Constitutions or other legal sources, or via the construction of transnational juridical infrastructures consistent with the logic of “planetary boundaries” (section “The Legal Practice Between “Tornado” and “Abortion” Politics”).