On the Contributions of Legal Sociology to the Law's Responses to Climate Change

The growing environmental awareness and the increasingly present effects of climate change have set a new research agenda for law and its various disciplines. While the claim to regulate the environment in which humans and their societies operate has perhaps been one of the main objectives of law (e.g. the idea of property), the emergence of independent fields of study dedicated exclusively to the legal protection of the environment is a relatively new but rapidly growing phenomenon. This ecological momentum has permeated all disciplines of law, producing new laws and provisions in each of its areas. Thus, for example criminal law has addressed the issue through so-called environmental or ecological crimes; constitutional law through guarantees for the protection of the right to a healthy environment; legal philosophy through reflection on the rights of non-humans and the principles that should govern our responsibility towards future generations; civil law through the reinterpretation of the concepts of property, person and tort; procedural law, in the challenges generated by environmental and future generations litigation on the traditional interpretation of the Locus standi in Judicio; in public international law, the consecration of the right to a healthy environment as a jus cogens norm or the challenges generated by the climate crisis on the concept of national sovereignty; private international law through the framework on environmental due diligence and administrative law in the emergence of new fields of regulation for the protection of the environmental public good. This sectoral approach favours a convergence in an interdisciplinary articulation that blurs the boundaries between the traditional perspectives of legal knowledge, promisingly accentuating the relevance of empirical approaches to law in action, to which legal sociology can make significant contributions. The purpose of this paper is to explore what these contributions might be and what their characteristics might be.