Climate Change Litigation, State Responsibility and the Role of Courts in the Global Regime: Towards a “Judicial Governance” of Climate Change?

INTRODUCTION: THE “SUBVERSIVE” NATURE OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NEED FOR A NEW LEGAL GRAMMAR Climate change has a subversive character. Its nature, characteristics, scale and intensity are so different from any other problem or menace humankind has faced so far that it requires a radical reconceptualisation of almost every field of human knowledge and its practices. The social, ethical, political and geopolitical, economic and legal dimensions are all inextricably entangled in this effort. The subversive or disruptive, so to speak, nature of climate change consists precisely in this, i.e. in the fact that – in all these domains – previous categories, institutions, procedures, ideas and, more generally, “modes of thought” need to be re-imagined and therefore redefined, if not completely and radically re-thought, to address the new global climate situation.