MacCormick Fellows Seminar - The Challenge of Climate Change: Domestic Governance and International Litigation

Speakers: MacCormick fellows Professor Shelley Welton and Dr Carlo de Stefano

The Evolving Roles of the State in the Clean Energy Transition (Professor Welton)
Responding effectively to climate change necessitates a rapid and thorough move from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. This presentation will comparatively examine institutional structures in the United Kingdom and the United States designed to drive this transition, considering their evolution over time, new pressures they face, and emerging experiments in governance design, including a return to state ownership and more robust state planning.

About the speaker 
Professor Shelley Welton is the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law and Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. She teaches environmental, climate change, and energy law and her research focuses on how climate change challenges governance arrangements and doctrine within energy and environmental law.

 

 

Giving “Teeth” to International Climate Change Law through International Investment Law (Dr de Stefano)
The urgency of the global fight against climate change is shaping also international investment law. This presentation highlights that States’ climate change actions that genuinely pursue the goals of the Paris Agreement are in principle legitimate under international investment agreements but for a finding of discriminatory, unfair or protectionist application. Moreover, “green” investors may be adequately protected under investment treaties and may rely at certain conditions on States’ unilateral commitments through periodically communicated nationally determined contributions to substantiate a violation of the fair and equitable treatment standard for failure of implementation.

About the speaker
Dr Carlo de Stefano (Ph.D., Bocconi University) is Assistant Professor of international law at the Department of Law of Roma Tre University, where he holds the courses of private international law and international arbitration. He has been visiting scholar at numerous research institutions including the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law of the University of Cambridge (Brandon Research Fellowship 2023) and currently is MacCormick Fellow at Edinburgh School of Law. His book “Attribution in International Law and Arbitration” was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

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