ABSTRACT
In late 2019, over 11,000 scientists from 153 countries published a declaration that the planet is facing a climate emergency. According to current data, radical changes to the status quo are required to avoid widespread suffering and loss of life. What radical change might legal educators effect to this end? Legal education plays an important role in facilitating and regulating anthropogenic environmental change by reproducing the knowledge and skills used by generations of legal professionals and policymakers to legitimate and prohibit economic and social relations and practices. Law prescribes a relationship between the human and more-than-human worlds that is unsustainable. By moving beyond a “business-as-usual” approach to teaching and assessing legal knowledge, we could transform how law is learned—enabling law graduates to support, through their professional contribution, to a just transition to an environmentally viable future. The overarching objective of legal education for the Anthropocene is to foreground and subvert the contribution of law to anthropogenic climate change. We must take up pedagogical opportunities to effect change before tipping points are reached beyond which such an endeavor would be ineffectual.
