Climate Change in Legal Scholarship: The First Generation (1958–1980)

Climate change has come to dominate contemporary environmental law scholarship, with an established set of themes, debates, and problematics that pervade the academic literature. But this was not always the case: when the prospects of climate change first emerged into the public discourse, it was a new issue that fit in uncertainly with existing research programmes. Was greenhouse gas emission a pollution problem, an energy issue, a potential tort, or something altogether different? What, if anything, was the academic and policy relevancy of a phenomenon that was, at the time, widely considered to be uncertain in effect and long-term in nature? How, in short, should climate change be framed? In this Article, I examine the responses of scholars through a systematic analysis of the legal academic literature engaging with climate change prior to 1980. My research shows a budding awareness of climate change in the period of 1958–1980, emerging from academics and practitioners alike, which tends to position climate change in three distinct frames: as a type of inadvertent weather/climate modification; as a form of environmental pollution or degradation; and (in particular during the late 1970s) as an energy policy factor. However, during this period, climate change was never the focal point of legal scholarship, was rarely positioned as a problem to be solved, and was largely ignored by environmental law professors.