As Climate Week at Penn begins, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School joins with other Penn schools in releasing a statement on academic priorities related to climate change:
Law and legal institutions lie at the heart of the global community’s response to climate change. Advancements in local, national, and international law are key to addressing the climate crisis, bringing justice to those disproportionately harmed by it, and forging strategies for coping with its unavoidable consequences. Climate change also creates a need for a new generation of lawyers attuned to the social, economic, political, and ecological dynamics of large-scale change.
At the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, we are committed to rigorous, cutting-edge scholarship and engaged teaching aimed at understanding the climate crisis and related environmental problems — and to identifying and implementing legal solutions to these problems.
We have a demonstrated commitment to focusing on climate change and environmental law through faculty and research excellence, a wide range of curricular options, and extensive opportunities for student service and engagement beyond the classroom. And we understand that climate change cannot be considered in isolation from other pressing social and economic issues, and thus encourage conversations related to climate and environmental justice throughout the broader law school curriculum and community.
The Law School’s statement is part of a university-wide Environmental Innovations Initiative that is “dedicated to leveraging Penn’s considerable academic strengths to meaningfully impact the critical environmental challenges of our time.”