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Government Procurement, Financial Services, and Environment: Linkages and Implications for the EU and Brazil
Get PDFThe relationship between trade and the environment is increasingly a priority for policymakers and civil society. However, some of the disciplines covered by modern trade agreements have not received enough attention when it comes to their potential impact on the environment. Financial services and government procurement are two such areas, even though they are increasingly consequential topics for international trade policy and negotiations. This blind spot merits greater consideration as the connections definitely exist: the regulation of government procurement and financial services can have positive or negative implications for environmental outcomes on the ground, which makes understanding these links a crucial task.
Engaging in this very task, this report focuses on the EU-Mercosur Trade Agreement, with a particular attention to the case of Brazil. Using the Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) as an analytical base, the report examines recent and relevant trade agreements entered into by Brazil and the EU to contextualize and understand the links between environmental protection on the one hand and government procurement and financial services on the other. The insights generated are then applied to the analysis of the government procurement and financial services chapters of the EUMTA, in an effort to understand how these rules affect parties’ ability to regulate in pursuit of environmental outcomes
Fair Use in the US Redux: Reformed or Still Deformed?
Get PDFIn 2019, Professor Ginsburg delivered the Distinguished Visitor in Intellectual Property Lecture at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. Titled “Fair Use in the US: Transformed, Reformed, Deformed?”, the lecture explored US caselaw applying the statutory fair use exception, highlighting its excesses and apparent rebalancing. Four and half years (and a pandemic) later, the Supreme Court has rendered decisions in two fair use cases (Google v Oracle; Andy Warhol Foundation v Goldsmith). Together, these controversies prompt inquiry whether the Supreme Court has redrawn the landscape of US fair use and copyright law, expanding fair use for commercial use of functional computer code, but narrowing it for at least some exploitations of “appropriation art.” That inquiry extends to the fair use doctrine’s potential to accommodate massive inputs of copyrighted works into databases to enable “machine learning” by artificial intelligence systems
Climate Litigation in the Global South: Mapping Report
Get PDFIn recent years, climate litigation has undergone a notable transformation globally, witnessing a surge in cases across diverse jurisdictions. While scholarly interest has predominantly focused on cases from the Global North, attention to litigation originating in the Global South has been more limited. Nonetheless, understanding the distinct legal grounds, remedies sought, and objectives of plaintiffs in the Global South is crucial. This report addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive insight into the current landscape of climate litigation in the Global South.
The report utilizes data from the Sabin Center’s Global Climate Change Litigation databases, which has seen an influx of new cases in recent years, thanks to enhanced data collection efforts and more cases being filed, especially in the past four years. By analyzing key metrics such as case numbers, statuses, trajectories, and legal decisions, the report offers concise analyses of climate litigation within each jurisdiction. It acknowledges the challenges and opportunities unique to the Global South’s legal landscape. As of March 2024, the databases encompass close to 2,629 cases, spanning 54 jurisdictions (excluding international or regional courts, tribunals, quasi-judicial bodies, or other adjudicatory bodies). Of these jurisdictions, 21 are from the Global South, accounting for 40.7% of those covered. However, despite this representation, Global South cases in the database are proportionally lower in number. Global South cases represent only 8.3% of the total cases documented
BU S4E0
No full textPhoto of Lauren Hirsch, reporter for The New York Times.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/beyond_unprecedented_podcast/1041/thumbnail.jp
Removing Methane via Atmospheric Oxidation Enhancement: The Legal Framework
Get PDFTo achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the increase in global average temperatures to “well below 2 degrees Celsius,” and ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels, global greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions must reach net zero in the second half of the century. The global community is not currently on track to achieve net zero emissions. In fact, with the exception of a slight dip during the Covid-19 pandemic, emissions have risen steadily in recent years. This, together with the increasingly visible impacts of climate change, has prompted growing interest in the possibility of removing GHGs directly from the atmosphere. While GHG removal cannot substitute for rapid and deep emissions cuts, it could help to offset residual emissions from hard-to-abate sectors and potentially even reduce the total atmospheric GHG load by delivering net negative emissions.
To date, efforts to advance GHG removal have primarily focused on developing carbon dioxide removal (“CDR”) techniques, but another GHG removal approach — atmospheric methane removal (“AMR”) — is now also beginning to receive attention. One AMR technique is atmospheric oxidation enhancement (“AOE”), which aims to accelerate the natural oxidation process whereby hydroxyl and chlorine radicals react with atmospheric methane, converting it into carbon dioxide and other by-products. This process could deliver significant climate benefits because methane is a particularly potent GHG, trapping 86 times more heat in the Earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it is released and 34 times more heat than carbon dioxide over 100 years (on a ton-for-ton basis). However, AOE is still in the very early stages of development, and significantly more research is required to fully evaluate its efficacy and impacts (both positive and negative).
This paper, Atmospheric Oxidation Enhancement: The Legal Framework, and the two accompanying case studies, explore the international and domestic (U.S.) laws governing methane removal via AOE. Parts 1 and 2 introduce the concept of AOE, explain proposed AOE techniques, and discuss the climate and non-climate benefits and risks that AOE may present. Part 3 then discusses key factors that will influence how AOE projects are regulated, both at the international level and domestically in the United States. With respect to the latter, Part 3 examines circumstances under which the United States may assert jurisdiction over AOE projects and introduces the different bodies of U.S. law — arising at the federal, tribal, state, and local levels — that might apply to such projects. The remainder of the paper then assesses the laws and regulations that might govern AOE projects: Part 4 identifies international agreements and rules of customary international law that might affect whether, when, where, and how AOE projects are conducted, and Part 5 explores applicable U.S. law that might apply to such projects, with a particular focus on federal environmental law.
The paper is accompanied by two case studies that highlight permitting, reporting, and other legal requirements that could impact two hypothetical AOE projects: one involving the dispersal of AOE aerosol from onshore towers located in coastal areas, and another conducted by adding iron-bearing additives to marine fuels used in ocean-going vessels
Global Guidance for Just Transition Policy: Policy Brief
Get PDFIn 2015, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted Guidelines for a Just Transition Towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All, providing authoritative and valuable international guidance for just transitions. CCSI has conducted a comparative analysis of the application of the ILO Guidelines in South Africa and Germany and examined the extent to which the ILO Guidelines address energy transition challenges facing developing countries.
This CCSI Policy Brief summarizes the comparison between South Africa’s and Germany’s just transition policies and the ILO Guidelines. It also summarizes CCSI’s findings and recommendations to shape further guidance on just energy transition policymaking from international institutions to support developing countries in 12 key areas: Government institutional capacity and corruption; Participation of affected groups in policy making; Decent employment; Green industry and economic diversification; Social protection; Skills development and training; Effective phase-out of fossil fuel production, use, and subsidies; International cooperation and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities; Human rights; Access to affordable and sustainable energy; Adequate finance; and Environmental remediation and repurposing of former industrial sites
Global Guidance for Just Transition Policy
Get PDFIn 2015, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted Guidelines for a Just Transition Towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All, providing authoritative and valuable international guidance for just transitions. CCSI has conducted a comparative analysis of the application of the ILO Guidelines in South Africa and Germany and examined the extent to which the ILO Guidelines address energy transition challenges facing developing countries.
The CCSI report, Global Guidance for Just Transition Policy, provides detailed context on South Africa’s and Germany’s national socio-political and energy conditions and policies, and comprehensively examines the legal and policy instruments adopted by both countries — the Just Transition Framework in South Africa and the Coal Exit Laws in Germany — and their application of the ILO Guidelines. Both countries historically relied on domestic coal production and are forerunners in national-level just transition policymaking in their respective regions
Prioritization of the Draft Provisions on Procedural and Cross-Cutting Issues
Get PDFPrioritization of the Draft Provisions on Procedural and Cross-Cutting Issues is a joint submission to the Secretariat\u27s request for comments on the prioritization of the draft provisions on procedural and cross-cutting issues. The submission calls for an approach to classification and prioritization that allows Working sufficient time to address issues that are particularly pressing in ISDS reform debates, including, for instance, draft provisions 10 (shareholder claims), 12 (right to regulate), and 23 (assessment of damages and compensation)
On Critical Geneaology
Get PDFToday most critical theorists who deploy history use a genealogical method forged by Nietzsche and Foucault. This genealogical approach now dominates historically inflected critique. But not all genealogical writings today, nor all philosophical debates surrounding genealogy, advance the goals of critical philosophy. It is crucial now that we assess the value of genealogical critiques. The proper metric against which to evaluate such work is whether it contributes to transforming ourselves, others, and society in a valuable way. In this article, I propose that we use the term “critical genealogy” to identify those genealogical practices that positively nourish our activity and, thereby, advance the ambition of critical philosophy
The Chain and the Rope
No full textThis chapter revisits some of the core stories of American constitutional history — slavery to freedom, noncitizenship to full inclusion, from the First Reconstruction to the Second, and state-based citizenship to national rights. It argues that one can see all this in the case of a putatively enslaved woman named Jane Johnson who, in Philadelphia in 1855, with the help of several Black porters and a white abolitionist, walked away from the man who claimed her as property. In the subsequent contests involving the man who wanted to reclaim her as his property, there was little talk of freedom, equal citizenship, or national rights. Instead, the arguments in court gradually focused on something that was asserted to predate the American colonies, that had traveled across the Atlantic to the New World — republican citizenship for the white men whose lives were involved in her case. In that world, the chapter argues, there was little room for a Black woman’s claim to equal citizenship and belonging to be heard — although her voice does briefly break through. The chapter poses a difficult question about constitutional history. Is the main story one of change over time in which the unrighted acquire rights and citizenship in an expanding nation, or is it story of deep-seated continuity where local hierarchies persist even through revolutionary changes in the formal constitutional order? Glass is suggesting that it is easier to see change, but that the stories of persistence are also there in the archive if we are discerning enough to see them