Isabelle GIRAUDOU is an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Organization for Programs on Environmental Sciences. Her main teaching areas are Critical Environmental Legal Thought and Earth System Law and Governance. Isabelle’s research interests relate to Law and/in the Anthropocene. Her current research explores how the converging fields of climate change law and disaster law engage with the ‘Anthropocene’ thought experiment. Her most recent proposal examines the skills, competences, and knowledge that different types of lawyers can mobilize, both in their contentious and non-contentious legal practice, to address the many legal disruptions caused by a continuously rising risk of more frequent and higher-impact climate change-induced extreme events in Japan. This proposal focuses on how legal reasoning progressively opens up to new narratives, understandings and modes of thinking, at the interface of Earth system science and planetary social thought.
Curriculum Design for the Anthropocene: A Discursive Approach to Case-Based Legal Education
Abstract:
Disruptive of legal systems, the Anthropocene defies the way legal practitioners deal with climate change and associated disaster risks: How, in ‘an era of unlimited harms’, can practicing lawyers utilize their expertise to shape the legal system’s response to a continuously rising risk of more frequent and higher-impact climate change-induced disasters? Is there a particular approach to climate disaster risk that lawyers could embrace, or something distinctive about climate crisis lawyering that calls for specific skills and knowledge? With a view to enriching the discussion on what to think like a (crisis) lawyer means and implies in the current era, this paper explores the practical and theoretical conditions under which legal education can engage with the Anthropocene
thought experiment. Focusing on Japan, it assesses the extent to which the application of
discursive design to case-based legal education might contribute to progressively open up legal reasoning to ‘planetary’ modes of thinking – and subsequently consolidate climate disaster law as an emergent area of legal knowledge and practice in Japan.