„Transnational Climate Change Law: Scrutinising State Responsibilities and Corporate Accountabilities” von Professor Peer Zumbansen (McGill University)

Transnational Political Economies of Climate Law
Distinguished Lecture, ECCHR Summer School, Nuremberg, 17 September 2025
Peer Zumbansen

Lecture focus

The lecture interrogates the place of “climate change law” in legal doctrine within the broader context of the hybrid and fragmented governance spaces which today make up the field.

Abstract

For some lawyers, “climate change law” is as self-evident as contract or corporate law. Others find it as contestable or unnecessary as, say, labour law or queer law. Their skepticism or outright hostility is justified with reference to doctrine, but is grounded in ideology. And, for others still, CCL is as intangible as cyberlaw or the law of online content moderation. Who is right, who is wrong? Environmental law once seemed, to some, a logical extension of tort, property and administrative law, while – for others – it seemed simply impossible, as in ‘not needed.’ Similar experiences were made before that with equal rights law, poverty law, prison law and others. And, again, similar experiences are being made today with fields / concepts such as ‘global value chain law’ or ‘modern slavery law.’ These are, to some, anything but self-evident. For others, they are challenging, for sure, but also immensely necessary.

These knots cannot be untied simply. It seems, instead, that the particular itch these conceptual proposals represent is performing a productive role. CCL, just like the other contested fields before and around it, remains a provocation to engage with law’s ability to address serious threats and unacceptable conditions. When we inquire into that ability, we are quickly in the deep end of questions that relate not merely to a particular legal doctrine or whether a CCL case would be going before a civil court or an administrative tribunal, whether CCL belongs to public or to private law, whether CCL is actually a domestic legal field or one that belongs to public international law. The absence of a clearly delimited body of legal doctrine further suggests that much about CCL is, shall we say, theoretical? Others, whose feathers already went up in the 1990s and 2000s when everyone began speaking about “governance”, are likely to associate CCL with all of the negatively associated elements around the absence of a clear hierarchy of authorized actors, private organizations exercising regulatory and quasi-regulatory functions and, overall, commercial, private actors having too much power. The distaste with governance was wide-spread among continental European lawyers, until eventually related chapters in leading administrative case books continued to expand exponentially.

The entwinement of soft and hard law, of nudging and enforcing, of mandating and recommending, of demanding transparency instead of concrete change – such are some of the key aspects we can associate today with CCL. That means that both the proposing and the unpacking of something so unwieldy as CCL requires that we both relax our expectations for hard, formal law while being very precise in where we look for CCL. What we find is that CCL has become an important dimension of law and regulatory governance in that we can find it in almost any specific area of law, regulation, and policy making today.

Bio

Peer Zumbansen holds the inaugural Professorship of Business Law at McGill’s Faculty of Law and has been the Academic Lead of the CIBC Office of Sustainable Finance under McGill University’s Sustainable Growth Initiative (SGI) from 2022-2025. Educated in Germany, France and the U.S. and admitted to the German bar, Zumbansen has held a number of visiting appointments, including at Yale Law School, the University of Michigan, Melbourne Law School, UCD Dublin, Tilburg Law School, the Université de Paris Dauphine, and others. A founder and long-time co-editor-in-chief of http://www.germanlawjournal.com, he launched the SSRN e-journal for the Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy Network (CLPE) at Osgoode Hall Law School. At King’s College London, Peer served as the inaugural Director of the Dickson Poon Transnational Law Institute from 2014-2020 and launched the “TLI Think! Papers SSRN series. At McGill, he launched the ‘Business Law Platform’ and the ‘Business Law Meter’ blog and is the founder and co-editor in chief of the McGill SGI Research Papers Series in Business, Finance, Law and Society with SSRN. In 2023 he launched the annual McGill MLP SGI Transformative Business Law Summer Academy (TBLSA), an interdisciplinary policy writing institute in Montréal, co-taught in collaboration with colleagues across Canada, the U.S. and abroad.

Recent publications: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=109516