Making Climate Lawyers

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The latest work from Kimberly Smith explores the history of why American law schools were resistant to teaching about climate change and how that changed over the course of a forty-year period, resulting in law schools across the country incorporating climate change into their curricula, with many even establishing centers on the environment. Based on dozens of interviews with faculty and students, Making Climate Lawyers fills a gap in the literature on the intellectual history of climate change, most of which focuses on the history of climate science. Smith focuses instead on how the climate problem fits (or doesn't fit) into the structure of American law. While climate change came onto the policy agenda in the mid-1980s, Smith's research shows that it had little presence in the environmental law curriculum until about 15 years later. To understand why, Smith examines the barriers that environmental law professors faced, how they overcame those barriers, and how they created "climate law" as a domain of legal specialization. Smith uses this story as a lens through which to understand both the transformation of legal education since the 1980s and the nature of climate change as a policy problem"--