Climate Change and Statutory Construction: Administrative Law Expertise and “New” Emergencies

Abstract

Responding to climate change requires multi-faceted and long-term public action, particularly in the administrative sphere. The centrality of statutory construction in climate change administrative law adjudication reflects this fact. This article is a study of how statutory construction arguments are figuring in these cases in common law jurisdictions. Arguments relate to direct and indirect climate change legislative provisions and legislative obligations concerning environmental assessment. A study of these different arguments underscores how climate change is giving rise to complex legal questions – a legal reality often overlooked in discourses about these cases as forms of strategic litigation. That legal reality points to the need to foster administrative law expertise in relation to both statutes and climate change. Such fostering requires the evolution of legal imagination.